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COPYRIGHT DEPOSET. 



A Student in Arms 




DONALD HANKEY 



A 

Student in Arms 

Second Series 

By 
Donald Hankey 

With an Introduction by 
J. St. Loe Strachey 

Editor of Tbe Spectator 




New York 
E. P. Button & Co. 

681 Fifth Avenue 






POBLISHBD, X9I7 
BY 

!B. P. DUTTON & CO, 





V 


JUL- 


-2 1917 


©Cl. 


A4()7703 


-x 


-A^ \ . 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



Something about "A Student in Arms" i 

Author's Foreword . . . -33 

I. — ^The Potentate .... 37 

II. — The Bad Side of Military Ser- 
vice ..... . . .51 

III. — The Good Side of "Militarism" 65 

IV. — A Month's Reflections . . 79 

V. — Romance 93 

VI. — Imaginary Conversations (I) . 109 

VII. — The Fear OF Death in War . .115 

VIII. — Imaginary Conversations (II) . 127 

IX. — The Wisdom of "A Student in 

Arms " 139 

ill 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

X. — Imaginary Conversations (III) . 145 

XI. — Letter to an Army Chaplain . 153 

XII.—'' Don't Worry" .... 165 

XIII. — Imaginary Conversations (IV) . 175 

XIV. — A Passing in June, 1915 . . 181 

XV. — My Home and School: 

I My Home .... 199 

II School 216 

Some Notes on the Fragment of Auto- 
biography BY "Hilda" . . . 237 



IV 



* 



A Student in Arms 



SOMETHING ABOUT 
"A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

^ By H. M. a. H. 

"His life was a Romance of the most noble 
and beautiful kind. " So says one who has 
known him from childhood, and into how 
many dull, hard and narrow lives has he not 
been the first to bring the element of 
Romance ? 

He carried it about with him; it breathes 
through his writings, and this inevitable 
expression of it gives the saying of one of his 
friends, that "it is as an artist that we 
shall miss him most, " the more significance. 

And does not the artist as well as the 
poet live forever in his works? Is not 
the breath of inspiration that such alone 
can breathe into the dull clods of their 
generation bound to be immortal ? 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

Meanwhile, his "Romance" Is to be 
written, and his biographer will be one 
whose good fortune it has been to see 
much of the "Student" in Bermondsey, 
the place that was the forcing-house of 
his development. In the following pages 
it Is proposed only to give an outline of 
his life, and particularly the earlier and 
therefore to the public unknown parts. 

Donald Hankey was born at Brighton 
in 1884; he was the seventh child of his 
parents, and was welcomed with excite- 
ment and delight by a ready-made family 
of three brothers and two sisters living 
on his arrival amongst them. He was 
the youngest of them by seven years, and 
all had their plans for his education and 
future, and waited jealously for the time 
when he should be old enough to be re- 
moved from the loving shelter of his mother's 
arms and be "brought up." 

His education did, as a matter of fact, 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

begin at a very early age; for one day, 
when he was perhaps about three years 
old, dressed in a white woolly cap and 
coat, and out for his morning walk, a 
neighbouring baby stepped across from 
his nurse's side and with one well-directed 
blow felled Donald to the ground! Don- 
ald was too much astonished and hurt at 
the sheer injustice of the assault to dream of 
retaliation, but when they reached home 
and his indignant nurse told the story, he 
was taken aside by his brothers and made 
to understand that by his failure to resist 
the assault, and give the other fellow back as 
good as he gave, "the honour of the family'' 
was impugned ! He was then and there put 
through a systematic course of "the noble 
art of self-defence." "And I think," 
said one of his brothers only the other 
day, "that he was prepared to act upon 
his instructions should occasion arise." 
It will be seen from this incident that his 
bringing-up was of a decidedly strenuous 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

character and likely to make Donald's 
outlook on life a serious one ! 

He was naturally a peace-loving and 
philosophical little boy, very lovable and 
attractive with his large clear eyes with 
their curious distribution of colour — the 
one entirely blue and the other three parts 
a decided brown — the big head set proudly 
on the slender little body, and the radiant 
illuminating smile, that no one who knew 
him well at any time of his life can ever 
forget. It spoke of a light within, "that 
mysterious light which is of course not 
physical," as was said by one who met 
him only once, but was quick to note this 
characteristic. 

Donald's more strenuous times were in 

the boys' holidays — those tumultuous of 

seasons so well known to the members of 

all big families ! His eldest brother, Hugh, 

was bent on making an all-round athlete of 

him; another brother saw in him an embryo 

county cricketer, while a third was most 

4 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

particular about his music, giving him 
lessons on the violoncello with clockwork 
regularity. The games were terribly thrill- 
ing and dangerous, especially when the 
schoolroom was turned into a miniature 
battlefield, with opposing armies of tiny 
lead soldiers. But Donald never turned 
a hair if Hugh were present, even at the 
most terrific explosions of gun-powder. His 
confidence in Hugh was complete. Nor did 
he mind personal injuries. When on one 
occasion he was hurled against the sharp 
edge of a chair, cutting his head open 
badly, and his mother came to the rescue 
with indignation, sympathy and bandages, 
whilst accepting the latter he deprecated the 
two former, explaining apologetically, "It's 
only because my head's so big. '* 

He admitted in after years to having 
felt most terribly swamped by the per- 
sonalities of two of his brothers. The 
third he had more in common with, for 

he was more peace-loving, and he seemed 

5 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

to have more time to listen to the small 
boy's confidences and stories, which Donald 
started to write at the age of six. 

Hugh, however, was his hero — a kind 
of demi-god. And truly there was some- 
thing Greek about the boy — in his singular 
beauty of person, coupled with his brilliant 
mental equipment, and above all in the 
nothing less than Spartan methods with 
which, in spite of a highly sensitive tem- 
perament, he set himself to overcome his 
handicap of a naturally delicate physique 
and a bad head for heights. He turned 
himself out quite an athlete, and actually 
cured his bad head by a course of walking on 
giddy heights, preferably roofs — the parapet 
of the tall four-storied house the children 
lived in being a favourite training ground. 

Donald was the apple of his eye, and 
he was quick to note a certain lack of 
vitality about the little boy — especially 
when he was growing fast — and a certain 
natural timidity. His letters from school 

6 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

are full of messages to and instructions 
concerning Donald's physical training, 
and from Sandhurst he would long to 
"run over and see after his boxing." 
He called him Don Diego, a name that 
suited the rather stately little fellow, and 
he used to fear sometimes that Donald 
was "getting too polite" and say he must 
"knock It out of him In the holidays." 
Needless to say, his handling of him was 
always very gentle. 

The other over- vital brother. If a prime 
amuser, was also a prime tease, and being 
nearer Donald in age was also much less 
gentle. 

Before very long these great personages 
took themselves off "zum neuen taten." 
But their Odyssey s came home In the shape 
of letters, which, with their descriptions of 
strange countries and peoples and records 
of adventures — often the realization of 
boyish dreams — and also of difficulties over- 
come, were well calculated to appeal to 

7 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

Donald's childish imagination, and to in- 
crease his admiration for the writers — and 
also his feeling of impotence, and of the 
impossibility of being able to follow in the 
tracks of such giants among men ! 

His mother, however, was his never- 
failing confidante and friend. His love 
and admiration for her were unbounded, as 
for her courage, unselfishness and con- 
stant thought for others, more especially 
for the poor and insignificant among her 
neighbours. Though the humblest minded 
of women, she could, when occasion de- 
manded, administer a rebuke with a decision 
and a fire that must have won the heartfelt 
admiration of her diffident little son. 

He was not easily roused himself, but 
there is one instance of his being so that 
is eminently characteristic. He had come 
back from school evidently very perturbed, 
and at first his sister could get nothing out 
of him. But at last he flared up. His 
face reddened, his eyes burned like coals 



ABOUT " A STUDENT IN ARMS " 

and, In a voice trembling with rage, 

he said, " (naming a school-fellow) 

talks about things that I won't even 
think !^' I 

At the age of about 14 he, too, went to 
Rugby, and there Is an Interesting pro- 
phecy about him by his brother Hugh 
belonging to this time. Hugh had by now 
earned a certain right to pronounce judg- 
ment, having already started to fulfil his 
early promise by making some mark as 
a soldier and a linguist. He had been 
Invited to join the Egyptain Army at a 
critical time In the campaign of 1897-98, 
thanks to his proficiency in Arabic. His 
work was cut short by serious illness, the 
long period of convalescence after which he 
had utilized in working for and passing the 
Army Interpreter's examination In Turkish 
as well as the higher one in Arabic and his 
promotion exam. All of which achieve- 
ments had been of use In helping him to 

wring out of the War Office a promise of 

9 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS " 

certain distinguished service in China. In 
a letter home he writes : — 

2ND Batt. the Royal Warwickshire, Regt., 

The Camp, 

Colchester. 
28th Sept., 1899. 

My dear Mamma, — 

I packed Donald off to school to-day in good 
time and cold-less. . . . He was wonderfully 
calm and collected. He was more at his ease in 
our mess than I should have been in a strange 
mess, and made himself agreeable to his neighbours 
without being forward. Also he looked very clean 
and smart, and was altogether quite a success. 

That child has a future before him if his energy 
is up to form, which I hope. His philosophy is 
most amazing. He looks remarkably healthy, and 
is growing nicely. . . . 

Shortly after this letter was written 

the South African War broke out, and 

before six months were over the writer 

was killed in action, at the age of 27, whilst 

10 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

serving with the Mounted Infantry at 
Paardeberg. 

It was the first sorrow of Donald's life, 
but SIX months later he was to suffer a yet 
more crushing blow in the loss of his dearly 
loved mother. The loss of his best con- 
fidante and his ideal seemed at first to 
stun the boy completely, and to cast 
him in upon himself entirely. Later on 
he remembered that he had felt at that 
time that he had nothing to say to any 
one. He had wondered what the others 
could have thought of him, and had thought 
how dreadfully unresponsive they must be 
finding him. His sister should have been 
of some use. But she can only think of 
herself then as of some strange figure, veiled 
and petrified with grief — ^grief not for her 
mother, but for the young hero whose mag- 
netism had thrilled through every moment 
of her life — ^yet pointing onwards, with 
mutely insistent finger, to the path that her 

hero had trodden. And Donald, dazed also 

11 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

himself by grief — though from another 
cause — of his own accord, placed his first 
uncertain steps on the road that leads to 
military glory. No "voice" warned him as 
yet, and he had no other decisive leading. 

If his sister failed him then, his father 
did not. Of him Donald wrote recently 
to an aunt, "Papa's letters to me are a 
heritage whose value can never diminish. 
His was indeed the pen of a ready writer, 
and in his case, as in the case of many rather 
reserved people, the pen did more justice to 
the man than the tongue. I never knew him 
until Mamma's death, when the weekly let- 
ter from him took the place of hers, and 
never stopped till I came home." 

At Rugby, Donald was accounted a 
dreamer. Without the outlet he had hither- 
to had for his confidences and his thoughts 
no doubt the tendency to dream grew upon 
him. "Behold this dreamer cometh,"was 
actually said of him by one of his masters. 

Nevertheless there were happy times 

12 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

when youth asserted itself and boyish 
friendships were made. In work he did 
well, for he entered the sixth form at the 
early age of i6^, and was thereby enabled, 
though he left young, to have his name 
painted up "in hall" below those of his 
three brothers, and also on his "study" 
door which belonged to each of the four 
in turn. 

He entered the Royal Military Acad- 
emy, Woolwich, straight from Rugby, and 
before he was seventeen. We have his 
word for it that he was spiritually very 
unhappy there, finding evils with which 
he was impotent to grapple, going up 
as he did so young from school and before 
he had had time to acquire a "games" 
reputation — that all-important qualifica- 
tion for a boy if he wishes to influence his 
fellows. Nevertheless youthful spirits were 
bound to triumph sometimes. He was a per- 
fectly sound and healthy, well-grown boy 
and a friend who was with him at "the 

13 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

Shop" says he can remember no apparent 
trace of unhappiness, and is full of tales of 
his jokes and his fun, his quaint caricatures 
and doggerel rhymes, his love of flowers and 
nature, his hospitalities, and his joy In getting 
his friends to meet and know and like each 
other. Though he made no mark at Wool- 
wich he did carry off the prize for the best 
essay on the South African War. With It 
he made his first appearance in print, for 
it was printed in the R. M. A. Magazine. 
While he was at Woolwich the family 
circle was enlarged by the arrival of a 
cousin from Australia, and she and Donald 
became the greatest of friends. She re- 
minded him in some way of his mother, and 
this made all the difference. 

The Island of Mauritius, to which he 
was sent at the age of twenty, not so very 
long after having received his commission 
in the Royal Garrison Artillery, stood for 
him later on, he has told us, as "Reve- 
lation" — "for there It was that I was 

14 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

first a sceptic, and was first shown that 
I could not remain one/' Also towards 
the end of his stay there, when he was 
doubting as to what course he should 
take, a sentence came to him insistently, 
"Would you know Christ? Lo, He is 
working in His vineyard." It was these 
things that decided him eventually to 
resign his commission, but of them his 
letters home make little or no mention. 
They are full, on the other hand, of descrip- 
tions of the beauties of the Island which, 
curious, odd, freakish and unexpected, 
held him as did those of no other place. 
The curious inconsistencies of the Creole 
nature also interested him, and he spent 
much of his spare time sketching and 
studying the people. Two friendships he 
made there were diverse and lasting, but 
he complains very much of feeling the lack 
of a woman friend — no one to tease and 
pick flowers for! 
While he was still there, there appeared 

15 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

at home a baby nephew — another "Hugh'* 
— "trailing clouds of glory/' but to return 
all too soon to his " Eternal Home. " Some 
years previously, when his eldest sister 
had told him of her engagement, he con- 
gratulated her warmly, and said he "had 
always longed for a nephew"! He never 
saw the child, but wrote after his death that 
he had heard so much about him that he 
seemed to know him, and "I think I must 
have played with him in my dreams." 
Possibly the baby nephew, in his short ten 
months of life, did more for his uncle than 
either knew, for no frozen hearts could do 
otherwise than melt in the presence of the 
Insistent needs of that gallant little spirit 
and fragile little body, and a more whole- 
hearted sister was awaiting him on his return 
home, which took place at the end of two 
years, after he had fallen a victim to the 
prevalent complaint In the R. G. A — abscess 
on the liver. It was caused by the shocking 
conditions under which the R. G. A. had 

16 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

to live in Mauritius during that hot sum- 
mer when the Russian Fleet sojourned in 
Madagascan waters, and in Donald's case 
it necessitated a severe operation. 

His joy in his homecoming was quickly 
clouded over, for his father died only a 
month or two after his return; not, how- 
ever, before he had given a delighted ac- 
quiescence to Donald's proposal to resign 
his commission and go to Oxford in order to 
study theology — his own favourite pursuit — 
with the object of eventually taking Holy 
Orders. 

In the spring of 1907 Donald took a 
trip to Italy with his sister and a Rhodes 
Scholar cousin from Australia. It was 
the young men's first visit, and each brought 
back a special trophy: Donald's, a large 
photograph of a fine virile "Portrait of a 
man" by Giorgione in black and white, and 
his cousin, a sweet Madonna head by Luini. 

Donald gave his sister her trophy on 
their return home, in remembrance of the 

a 17 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

lectures she had given the two of them 
on the pre-Raphaelite painters In Florence. 
It took the form of a water-colour carica- 
ture of herself, sitting enthroned In a 
Loggia as a sort of Sybil Saint with a halo 
and a book (Baedeker). Behind her, and 
outlined against a pale sky as seen through 
an archway of the Loggia In the typical 
Florentine fashion, are the blue mountains 
near Florence, some tall cypresses, a cam- 
panile and a castle perched on the top of a 
hill — all features of the landscapes through 
which they had passed together. In the 
foreground are himself and his cousin as 
monks adoring, also with haloes, and expres- 
sions of mock ecstasy ! 

On his return Donald went for a few 
months to Rugby House, the Rugby 
School Mission, in order to cram for Oxford. 
He thereby made a friend, and learned to 
love Browning. 

After living so long at Brighton, and 
then in barracks, the beauty of Oxford 

18 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

was in itself alone a revelation to him. 
The work there, too, was entirely con- 
genial. As a gunner subaltern he had 
been a square peg in a round hole. As 
regards the work there had been far too 
much to be accepted on authority for one 
of his fundamental type of mind; the rela- 
tions existing between an officer and his 
men — in peace time, at any rate — seemed 
to him hardly human, and the making of 
quick decisions, which an officer is con- 
tinually called upon to do, was then as 
always very difficult to him. His tastes, 
too, unusual in a subaltern, had made 
him rather lonely. He found much more 
in common with the undergraduate than 
with the subaltern. Going up as an 
"oldster" (22) was to him an advantage 
rather than otherwise, for his six years 
in the Army had given him a certain pres- 
tige which was a help to his natural diffi- 
dence, and helped to open more doors to 
him, so that he was not limited to any set. 

19 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

He gained some reputation as a host, 
for he had the born host's gift of getting 
the right people together and making 
them feel at their ease. There was also, 
as a rule, some little individual touch 
about his entertainments that made them 
stand out. His manner, though naturally 
boyish and shy, could be both gay and 
debonair, quite irresistible in fact, when he 
was surrounded by congenial spirits! He 
played hockey, and was made a member of 
several clubs, sketched and made beautiful 
photographs. His time he divided strictly 
between the study of man and the study of 
theology, and though he did much hard, 
thorough and careful work in connexion 
with the latter, he always maintained 
that for a man who was going to be a parson 
the former was the more important study 
of the two. 

He used, however, to complain much at 
this time of feeling himself incapable of any 
very strong emotion, even that of sorrow. 

20 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS'* 

No doubt there is more stimulation to 
the brain than to the heart in the highly 
critical atmosphere of all phases of the 
intellectual life at Oxford; also Donald had 
hardly yet got over the shocks of his youth 
and the loneliness of his life abroad. He 
was, too, essentially and curiously the son 
of his father — even to his minor tastes, 
such as his connoisseur's palate for a good 
wine and his judgment in "smokes" — and 
this feeling of a certain detachment from 
the larger emotions of life was always his 
father's pose — the philosopher's. In his 
father's case it was perhaps engendered, if 
not necessitated, by his poor health and 
wretched nerves. 

But can we not trace his dissatisfaction 
at this time in what he felt to be his cold 
philosophical attitude towards life to the 
same cause as much of the misery he suffered 
as a boy! In the paper he calls "School," 
which follows with that entitled "Home, " he 
tells us how he would have liked to have 

21 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

chastised a school-fellow "had he dared," 
and his failure to dare was evidently what 
reduced him to the state of impotent rage 
described on page 9 of this sketch. Again 
at Woolwich, what made him unhappy 
was not so much the evils which he saw 
but his impotence to deal with them. So 
now again at Oxford he feels "impotent," 
impotent this time to feel and sympathize 
as he would have wished with suffering 
humanity. But within him was the light, 
"the light which is, of course, not physical, " 
which betrayed itself through his wonderful 
smile — the same now as in babyhood; and 
from his mother, and perhaps also from the 
young country that gave her birth, he had 
inherited, as well as her great heart and 
broad human sympathies, the vigour that 
was to carry him through the experiences 
by means of which, in the fullness of time, 
that light, no longer dormant, was to break 
into a flame of infinite possibilities. 

Donald's one complaint against Oxford 

22 



ABOUT " A STUDENT IN ARMS " 

was that the ideas that are born and gener- 
ated there so often evaporate in talk and 
smoke. He left with the determination to 
"do," but before going on to a Clergy 
School he decided to accept a friend's invi- 
tation to visit him in savage Africa so 
that he might think things over, and put 
to the test, far away from the artificialities 
of Modern Life, the ideas he had assimilated 
in the highly sophisticated atmosphere of 
Oxford. As he quaintly put it: "Since Paul 
went into Arabia for three years, I don't see 
why I should not go to British East Africa 
for six months!" He did not, however, 
stay the whole time there, but re-visited 
his beloved Mauritius, and also stayed in 
Madagascar. 

The beginning of 191 1 found him at the 
Clergy School. But what he wanted he 
did not find there. During his Oxford 
vacations he had made many expeditions to 
poorer London, at first to Notting Dale 
where was the Rugby School Mission, 

23 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

and afterwards to Bermondsey. But these 
expeditions had not been entirely satisfac- 
tory. He had then gone as a "visitor/* 
The lessons he wanted to learn now from 
"the People '' could only be learned by 
becoming as far as possible one of them. 
The story of his struggles to do so in his 
life in Bermondsey, and of his journey to 
Australia in the steerage of a German 
liner and of his roughing it there, always 
with the same object in view, cannot be 
told here. The first outcome of it all 
was the writing of his book. The Lord of 
All Good Life. Of this book he says, in a 
letter to his friend Tom Allen of the Oxford 
and Bermondsey Mission: 

"The book I regard as my child. I 
feel quite absurdly about it; to me it is 
the sudden vision of what lots of obscure 
things really meant. It is coming out 
of dark shadows into — moonlight. . . . 
I would have you to realize that it was 
written spontaneously in a burst, in six 

24 



ABOUT " A STUDENT IN ARMS " 

weeks, without any consultation of authori- 
ties or any revision to speak of. I had 
tried and tried, but without success. Then 
suddenly everything cleared up. To myself, 
the writing of it was an illumination. I did 
not write it laboriously and with calculation 
or because I wanted to write a book and be 
an author. I wrote it because problems 
that had been troubling me suddenly cleared 
up and because writing down the result was 
to me the natural way of getting everything 
straight in my own mind. " 

The book was written not away in the 
peace of the country, nor in the compara- 
tive quiet of a certain sunny little sit- 
ting-room I know of, looking on to a leafy 
back garden in Kensington, where Donald 
often sat and smoked and wrote, but in a 
little flat in a dull tenement house in a 
grey street in Bermondsey, where I re- 
member visiting him with a cousin of his. 

Here the Student lived like a lord — 
for Bermondsey! For he possessed two 

£5 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

flats, one for his "butler" — a sick-looking 
young man in list slippers, and his wife 
and family — and the other for himself. 

The little sitting-room in which he enter- 
tained us was very pleasant, with light 
walls, a bright table-cloth, a gleam of some- 
thing brass that had come from Ceylon, 
one or two gaily painted dancing shields 
from Africa, and two barbaric looking 
dolls, about a foot high, dressed chiefly in 
beads and paint, that he had picked up in an 
Antananarivo shop in Madagascar. They 
came in usefully when he was lecturing on 
Missions ! 

His bedroom he did not want us to 
see. It struck cold and appeared to be 
reeking with damp ! 

The weather had been rather dull when 
we arrived, but suddenly there was a 
glint of sunshine, and a grind-organ that 
had wandered up the street started playing 
just opposite. Two couple of children 
began to dance. A girl with a jug stopped 

26 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

to watch them, and mothers with babies 
came to their doors. A window was thrown 
open opposite and a whole family of children 
leaned out to see the fun. 

Bermondsey was gay, and after we had 
gone the "Student'' perpetuated the fact 
in a water-colour drawing which he sent 
to his cousin afterwards. 

In the evening, however, the sounds 
would be more discordant, also the Student 
was running a Boys' Club, taking several 
Sunday services at the Mission, visiting 
some very sick people, and attending to 
a multifarious list of duties which left me 
breathless when I saw it, knowing too 
how many casual appeals always came to 
him and that he never was known to re- 
fuse a helping hand to any one! Never- 
theless it was there, and in six weeks, that 
the Lord of All Good Life was written ! 

"Then came the war," and the Student 
shall tell us in his own words what it meant 
to him. Writing still to Tom Allen, who 

27 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

had also enlisted, and afterwards also gave 
his life In the war, he says: 

"For myself the war was, in a sense, 
a heaven-sent opportunity. Ever since I 
left Leeds I have been trying to follow 
out the theory that the proper subject of 
study for the theologian was man, and 
had increasingly been made to feel that 
nothing but violent measures could over- 
come my own shyness sufficiently to en- 
able me to study outside my own class. 
Enlistment had always appealed to me 
as one of the few feasible methods of 
ensuring the desired results 

"I was interested to hear that you 

found the so illuminating as regards 

human potentialities for bestiality. I 
think that I plumbed the depths between 
sixteen and a half and twenty-two. I 
have learned nothing more since then 
about bestiality. In fact I am hardened, 
and, I am afraid, take it for granted. 
Since then I have been discovering human 

28 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

goodness, which is far more satisfactory. 
And oh, I have found it! In Bermondsey, 
in the stinking hold of the Zieten, in the wide, 
thirsty desert of Western Austraha, and in 
the ranks of the 7th BattaUon of the Rifle 
Brigade. I enlisted very largely to find out 
how far I really believed in the brotherhood 
of man when it comes to the point — and I 
do believe in it more and more. " 

Donald Hankey enlisted in August, 1914, 
and after a period of training, part of which 
was certainly the happiest time of his life, he 
went to the front in May, 1915, coming 
home wounded in August, when he wrote 
for the Spectator most of the articles that 
were published anonymously the following 
spring under the title of A Student in Arms. 
Before he left hospital he received a com- 
mission in his old regiment, the R.G.A., but 
still finding himself with no love for big 
guns, he transferred to his eldest brother's 
regiment, the Royal Warwickshire, hoping 
that by doing so he might get back to the 

29 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

front the sooner. He did not, however, 
leave until May, 19 16, after he had written 
his contribution to Faith or Fear. 

Most of the numbers of the present 
volume were written in or near the trenches, 
and a fellow-officer gave his sister an in- 
teresting description of how it was done. 
"Your brother," said he, "will sit down 
in a corner of a trench, with his pipe, 
and write an article for the Spectator, or 
make funny sketches for his nephews and 
nieces, when none of the rest of us could 
concentrate sufficiently even to write a 
letter. " 

On October 6th, Donald Hankey wrote 
home: "We shall probably be fighting by 
the time you get this letter, but one has 
a far better chance of getting through now 
than in July. I shall be very glad if we 
do have a scrap, as we have been resting 
quite long enough. Of course one always 
has to face possibilities on such occasions; 
but we have faced them in advance, haven't 

30 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

we? I believe with all my soul that what- 
ever will be, will be for the best. As I said 
before, I should hate to slide meanly 
into winter without a scrap. ... I have 
a top-hole platoon — nearly all young, and 
nearly all have been out here eighteen 
months — thoroughly good sporting fel- 
lows; so if I don't do well it will be my 
fault. " 

Six days after this the Student knelt 
down for a few seconds with his men — 
we have it on the testimony of one of them 
— and he told them a little of what was 
before them: ''If wounded, 'Blighty'; if 
killed, the Resurrection.'' Then "over 
the top." He was last seen alive rallying 
his men, who had wavered for a moment 
under the heavy machine gun and rifle 
fire. He carried the waverers along with 
him, and was found that night close to 
the trench, the winning of which had cost 
him his life, with his platoon sergeant 
and a few of his men by his side. 

31 



ABOUT "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

What wonder that his cousin and best 
friend, when asked a short time previously 
what he was Hke, had replied, "He is the 
most beautiful thing that ever happened/' 



32 



' AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 

(Being Extracts from Letters to his 

Sister) 

"I AM very much wondering whether 
you will receive *A Diary* in four parts. 
It is very much founded on fact, though 
altered in parts. You will probably be 
surprised at a certain change in tone, 
but remember that my previous articles 
were written in England,' while this was 
written on the spot. . . . The Diary 
was not my diary, though it was so very 
nearly what mine might have been that 
it is difficult to say what is fiction and 
what is actuality in it. With regard to 
the ^conversation' during the bombard- 
ment, it represents in its totality what 
I believe the ordinary soldier feels. He 
loathes the war, and the grandiloquent 

3 33 



AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 



speeches of politicians irritate him by 
their failure to realize how loathesome 
war is. At the same time he knows he 
has got to go through with it, and only 
longs for the chance to hurry up. In the 
'Diary/ again, I quite deliberately empha- 
sized the depression of the man who thought 
he was being left out, and the mental 
effect of the clearing-up process because 
I thought that it would be a good thing 
for people to realize this side, and also 
partly because I felt that in previous 
articles I had glossed over it too much. 
... If I get a chance of publishing another 
book I shall certainly include them. " 

Note. — Not only "A Diary" and "Imaginary Conversa- 
tions," but every paper in the present collection, with the ex- 
ception of "The Wisdom, " "The Potentate, " and " A Passing 
in June," were written in France in 1916, and many of them 
actually in the trenches. The rough sketch for "A Passing in 
June" was written in France in 19 15, but was completed when 
the author was in hospital at home. 

"The Potentate" was written for the original volume of A 
Student in A rms, but was not published on account of its like- 
ness in subject to Barrie's play, Der Tag, which, however, 
Donald had not seen or even heard of when he wrote his own. 

34 



THE POTENTATE 



35 



THE POTENTATE^ 

Scene. ^ A tent {interior). The Potentate 
is sitting at a table listening to his 
Court Chaplain. 

Court Chaplain {concluding his remarks). 
Where can we look for the Kingdom of 
God, Sire, if not among the German people ? 
Consider your foes. The English are Phari- 
sees, hypocrites. Woe to them, saith the 
Lord. The French are atheists. The Bel- 
gians are ignorant and priest-ridden. The 
Russians are sunk in mediaeval superstition. 
As for the Italians, half are atheists and the 
other half idolators. Only in Germany do 
you find a reasonable and progressive faith, 

' It is necessary to state that The 'Potentate was written 
before Sir James Barrie's play Ber Tag appeared. 

37 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



devoid of superstition, abreast of scien- 
tific thought, and of the highest ethical 
value. Germany then, Sire, is the King- 
dom of God on earth. The Germans are 
the chosen people, the heirs of the promise, 
and let their enemies be scattered ! 

{The Potentate rises ^ leans forward with 
his hands on the tahle^ and an expression 
of extreme gratification^ while the Chap- 
lain stands with a smug and respectful 
smile on his white face,) 

Potentate. You are right, my dear 
Clericus, abundantly right. Very well put 
indeed! Yes, Germany is the Kingdom of 
God, and I {drawing himself up to his full 
height) — I am Germany! The strength of 
the Lord is in my right arm, and He teaches 
it terrible things for the unbeliever and the 
hypocrite. With God I conquer! Good- 
night, my dear Clericus, good-night. 

(Clericus departs with a low boWy and 

38 



THE POTENTATE 



the Potentate sinks into his chair 
with a gesture of fatigue. Enter a 
General of the Headquarters Staf 
with telegrams.) 

Potentate {brightening). Ha, my dear 
General, you have news ? 

General. Excellent news, Sire! On 
the Eastern front the Russians continue 
to give way. In the West a French attack 
has been repulsed with heavy loss, and our 
gallant Prussians have driven the British 
out of half a mile of trenches. 

{At this last bit of news the Potentate 
springs to his feet with a look of joy,) 

Potentate. A sign! My God, a sign! 
Pardon, General, I was thinking of a con- 
versation that I have just had with Dr. 
Clerlcus. Come now, show me where 
these trenches are. 

{The General produces a mapy over which 
they pore together,) 

39 



A STUDENT IN AEMS 



Potentate. Excellent, excellent! A 
most valuable capture. Our losses were 
. . .? 

General. Slight, Sire. 

Potentate. Better and better. I can- 
not afford to lose my good Prussians, 
my heroic, my invincible Prussians. To 
what do you attribute the success .? 

General. The success was due In a 
large measure to the perfection of the 
apparatus suggested a week ago by your 
Majesty's scientific adviser. 

Potentate (blanching a little). Ah, 
then it was not a charge, eh? 

General. The charge followed. Sire; 
but the work was already done. The 
defenders of the trench were already 
dead or dying before our heroes reached 
it. 

Potentate {sinking back in his chair 
with his finger to his lips, and a slight frown). 
Thank you. General, your news is of the 
best. I will detain you no longer. {The 



THE POTENTATE 



General bows,) Stay! Has a counter- 
attack been launched yet ? 

General. Not yet, Sire. No doubt 
one will be attempted to-night. Our 
men are prepared. 

Potentate. Good. Bring me fresh 
news as soon as It arrives. Good-night, 
General, good-night. 

{Exit General) 

{The Potentate sits musing for a consider^ 
able time. A slight cough is heard, 
and he raises his head,) 

Potentate {slowly). Enter! 

{Enter a tall figure in a long black academic 
gown and black clothes^ 

Potentate {with an attempt at gaiety). 
Come in, my dear Sage, come in. You 
are welcome. {A little anxiously) You 
have the crystal? Good. How is the 

41 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



Master? Still busy devising new means 
of victory ? 

The Sage. My master*s poor skill is 
always at your service, Sire. You have 
only to command. 

Potentate. I know It. Now let me 
have the crystal. I would see If possible 
the scene of to-day's victory in Flanders. 

{The Sage hands him the crystal with a 
low how. The Potentate seizes it 
eagerly^ and gazes into iu A pause,) 

Potentate {raising his head suddenly). 
Horrible, horrible! 

Sage. Sire? 

Potentate. This last invention of your 
master's is inhuman! 

Sage. War is inhuman. Sire. Where 
a speedy end is desired, is it not kindest 
to be cruel? 

{The Potentate gazes again into the crys- 

42 



THE POTENTATE 



tal, hut starts up immediately with 
a gasp of horror,) 

Potentate. Again the same vision! 
Always after my victories the vision of 
the Crucified, with the stern reproachful 
eyes! Am I not the Lord's appointed 
instrument? What means it? Tell your 
master that I will have no more of his 
inventions. They are too diabolical! 
They imperil my cause ! 

Sage {pointing to the crystal). Look 
again, Sire. 

Potentate {gazing into the crystal^ and 
in a low and agonized voice). Time with 
his scythe raised menacingly against me. 
{Abruptly) This is a trickery. Sirrah! 
Have a care! But I will not be tricked. 
Are my troops not brave? Are they not 
invincible? Can they not win by their 
proven valour? Who can stand against 
them, for the strength of the Lord is in 
their right hands? 

43 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



{Enter General hastily) 

General. Sire . . . {He starts, and 
stops short). 

Potentate {testily). Go on/ go on. 
What is it? 

General. Sire, the English counter- 
attack has for the moment succeeded. 
Infuriated by their defeat they fought so 
that no man could resist them. They 
have regained the trenches they had lost, 
but we hope to attack again to-morrow, 
when 

Potentate. Enough! Leave me! 

{The General withdraws, and the Poten- 
tate leans forward with his head on 
his hands,) 

Sage {commiseratingly). Apparently 
other troops are brave besides your own. 
Sire! 

Potentate {brokenly). The cowards! 

44 



THE POTENTATE 



The cowards! Five nations against three! 
Alas, my poor Prussians ! 

Sage. If you will look once more 
into the crystal, Sire, I think you will 
see something that will interest you. 

{The Potentate takes the crystal agaiuy 
but without confidence,) 

Potentate {in a slow recitative), A 
stricken field by night. The dead lie 
everywhere, German and English, side 
by side. But all are not dead. Some 
are but wounded. They help one another. 
Prussian and Briton help one another, 
with painful smiles on their white faces. 
What.? Have they forgotten their hate? 
My Prussians! Can you so soon forget.? 
I mourn for you! But who are these? 
White figures, vague, elusive! See, they 
seem to come down from above. They 
are carrying away the souls of my Prus- 
sians! And of the accursed English! 

45 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



What! One Paradise for both! Im- 
possible! And who is that watching? 
He who with a smile so loving, and yet 
so stern . . . Ah! . . . My God . . . 
no! . . . not I . . . 

{The Potentate rises with a strangled cry^ 
and sinks into his chair a nerveless 
wreck. The Sage watches coolly^ with 
a cynical smile,) 

Sage. So, Sire, you must find room 
for the English in that kingdom of yours 
and God's! Perchance it is more catho- 
lic than we had thought! 

{The Potentate groans,) 

Sage. Sire, you have seen some truth 
to-night. Is courage, is God, all on your 
side? Is Time on your side? Shall I 
go back to my master and tell him that 
you need no more of his inventions? 



THE POTENTATE 



{He pauses^ and glances at the Potentate 
with a look of contempt, and then turns 
to go. The Potentate looks round him 
with a ghastly stare,) 

Potentate (Jeehly). No . . . the Cru- 
cified . . . Time . . . Stay, stay! 

{The Sage turns with a gesture of triumph,) 

{Curtain,) 



47 



THE BAD SIDE OF MILITARY 
SERVICE 



49 



II 

THE BAD SIDE OF MILITARY SERVICE 

A PADRE who has earned the right to talk 
about the ^'average Tommy," writes to 
me that A Student in Arms gives a very 
one-sided picture of him. While cordially 
admitting his unselfishness, his good com- 
radeship, his patience, and his pluck, my 
friend challenges me to deny that military, 
and especially active, service often has a 
brutalizing effect on the soldier, weakening 
his moral fibres, and causing him to sink 
to a low animal level. 

Those who are In the habit of reading 
between the lines will, I think, often have 
seen the shadow of this darker side of 
army life on the pages of A Student in 
Arms; but I have not written of It speci- 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



fically for several reasons. It will suffice 
if *I mention two. First, I was writing 
mainly of the private and the N. C. 0, 
Rightly or wrongly, I Imagined that those 
for whom I was writing were In the habit 
of taking for granted this darker side of 
life In the ranks. I imagined that they 
thought of the "lower classes" as being 
naturally coarser and more animal than 
the "upper classes.'' I wanted then, and 
I want now, to contradict that belief 
with all the vehemence of which I am 
capable. Officers and men necessarily de- 
velop different qualities, different forms 
of expression, different mental attitudes. 
But I am confident that I speak the truth 
when I say that essentially, and in the 
eyes of God there is nothing to choose 
between them. 

If I must write of the brutalizing effect 
of war on the soldier, let it be clearly 
understood that I am speaking, not of 
officers only, nor of privates only, but of 

52 



THE BAD SIDE OF MILITARY SERVICE 

fighting men of every class and rank. As 
a matter of fact I have never, whether 
before or during the war, belonged to a 
mess where the tone was cleaner or more 
wholesome than It was In the Sergeants' 
Mess of my old battalion. 

My second reason for not writing about 
the bad side of Army life was that mere 
condemnation Is so futile. I have listened 
to countless sermons In which the "lusts 
of the flesh" were denounced, and have 
known for certain that their power for good 
was nil. If I write about It now. It is only 
because I hope that I may be able to make 
clearer the causes and processes of such moral 
deterioration as exists, and thus to help 
those who are trying to combat It, to do so 
with greater understanding and sympathy. 

Even in England most officers, and all 
privates, are cut off from their womenfolk. 
Mothers, sisters, wives, and sweethearts are 
inaccessible. All have a certain amount 
of leisure, and very little to do with It. 

53 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



All are physically fit and mentally rather 
unoccupied. All are living under an un- 
natural discipline from which, when the 
last parade of the day is over, there is a 
natural reaction. Finally, wherever there 
are troops, and especially in war time, there 
are "bad" women and weak women. The 
result is inevitable. A certain number of 
both officers and men "go wrong." 

Fifteen months ago I was a private 
quartered in a camp near Aldershot. 
After tea it began to get dark. The tent 
was damp, gloomy, and cold. The Y. M. 
C. A. tent and the Canteen tent were 
crowded. One wandered off to the town. 
The various soldiers' clubs were filled and 
overflowing. The bars required more 
cash than one possessed. The result was 
that one spent a large part of one's even- 
ings wandering aimlessly about the streets. 
Fortunately I discovered an upper room in 
a Wesleyan soldiers' home, where there 
was generally quiet, and an empty chair. 



54 



THE BAD SIDE OF MILITARY SERVICE 

I shall always be grateful to that "home," 
for the many hours which I whiled away 
there with a book and a pipe. But most 
of us spent a great deal of our leisure, bored 
and impecunious, "on the streets"; and 
if a fellow ran up against "a bit of skirt," 
he was generally just in the mood to 
follow it wherever it might lead. The 
moral of this is, double your subscriptions 
to the Y. M. C. A., Church huts, soldiers' 
clubs, or whatever organization you fancy! 
You will be helping to combat vice in the 
only sensible way. 

I don't suppose that the officers were 
much better off than we were. Their 
tents may have been a little lighter and 
less crowded than ours. They had a late 
dinner to occupy part of the long evening. 
They had more money to spend, and 
perhaps more to occupy their minds. But 
I fancy that as great a proportion of them 
as of us took the false step; and though 
perhaps when they compared notes their 

55 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



language may have been less blunt than 
ours, I am not sure that, for this very 
reason, it may not have been more poison- 
ous. But mind you, we did not all go 
wrong, by any means, though I believe 
that some fellows did, both officers and 
men, who would not have done so if they 
had stayed at home with their mothers, 
sisters, sweethearts, or wives. 

So much for the Army at home. When 
we cross the Channel every feature is a 
hundred times intensified. Consider the 
fighting man in the trenches — and I am 
still speaking of both officers and men — 
the most ordinary refinements of life are 
conspicuously absent. There is no water 
to wash in. Vermin abound, sleeping 
and eating accommodations are frankly 
disgusting. One is obliged for the time 
to live like a pig. Added to this one is 
all the time in a state of nervous tension. 
One gets very little sleep. Every night 
has its anxieties and responsibilities. Dan- 

56 



THE BAD SIDE OF MILITARY SERVICE 

ger or death may come at any moment. 
So for a week or a fortnight or a month, 
as the case may be. Then comes the 
return to billets, to comparative safety and 
comfort — the latter nothing to boast about 
though! Tension is relaxed. There is an 
inevitable reaction. Officers and men 
alike determine to "gather rosebuds" 
while they may. Their bodies are fit, 
their wills are relaxed. If they are built 
that way, and an opportunity offers, they 
will "satisfy the lusts of the flesh." 

When there is real fighting to be done 
the dangers of the after-reaction are in- 
tensified. You who sit at home and read 
of glorious bayonet charges do not realize 
what it means to the man behind the 
bayonet. You don^t realize the repugnance 
for the first thrust — a repugnance which has 
got to be overcome. You don't realize the 
change that comes over a man when his 
bayonet is wet with the blood of his first 
enemy. He "sees red." The primitive 

57 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



"blood-lust," kept under all his life by the 
laws and principles of peaceful society, 
surges through his being, transforming him, 
maddening him with the desire to kill, kill, 
kill ! Ask any one who has been through it 
if this is not true. And that letting loose of 
a primitive lust is not going to be without 
its effect on a man's character. 

At the same time, of course, not all of 
us become animals out here. There are 
other influences at work. Caring for the 
wounded, burying the mutilated dead, 
cause one to hate war, and to value ten 
times more the ways of peace. Many are 
saved from sinking in the scale, by a love 
of home which is able to bridge the gulf 
which separates them from their beloved. 
The letters of my platoon are largely love 
letters — often the love letters of married 
men to their wives. 

There is immorality in the Army; when 
there is opportunity immorality is rife. 
Possibly there is more abroad than there is 

58 



THE BAD SIDE OF MILITARY SERVICE 

at home. If so it is because there is far 
greater temptation. Nevertheless, I fancy 
that my correspondent, who is a padre, 
a don, and at least the beginning of a 
saint, is perhaps inclined to exaggerate the 
extent of the evil in the Army as compared 
with civil life. I imagine that very few 
padres, especially if they are dons, and 
most of all if they are saints, realize that 
in civil life as in Army life, the average 
man is immoral, both in thought and deed. 
Let us be frank about this. What a doctor 
might call the "appetites" and a padre 
the "lusts" of the body, hold dominion 
over the average man, whether civilian or 
soldier, unless they are counteracted by a 
stronger power. The only men who are 
pure are those who are absorbed in some 
pursuit, or possessed by a great love; 
be it the love of clean, wholesome life 
which is religion, or the love of a noble 
man which is hero-worship, or the love of 
a true woman. These are the four powers 

59 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



which are stronger than ''the flesh" — the 
zest of a quest, religion, hero-worship, and 
the love of a good woman. If a man is 
not possessed by one of these he will be 
immoral. 

Probably most men are immoral. The 
conditions of military, and especially of 
active service merely intensify the tempta- 
tion. Unless a soldier is wholly devoted 
to the cause, or powerfully affected by 
religion, or by hero-worship, or by pure 
love, he is immoral. 

Perhaps most men are immoral if they 
get the chance. Most soldiers are im- 
moral if they get the chance. But those 
who are trying to help the soldier can do so 
with a good heart if they realize that in 
him they have a foundation on which to 
build. Already he is half a hero-wor- 
shipper. Already he half believes in the 
beauty of sacrifice and in the life immortal. 
Already he is predisposed to value ex- 
ceedingly all that savours of clean, whole, 

60 



THE BAD SIDE OF MILITAHY SERVICE 

some home life. On that foundation it 
should be possible to build a strong ideal- 
ism which shall prevail against the flesh. 
And this is my last word — it is by build- 
ing up, and not by casting down, that 
the soldier can be saved from degrada- 
tion. The devil that possesses so many can 
only be cast out by an angel that is stronger 
than he. 



61 



THE GOOD SIDE OF "MILITARISM 



99 



63 



Ill 

THE GOOD SIDE OF " MILITARISM" 

I HAD a letter the other day from an 
Oxford friend. In it was this phrase: "I 
loathe militarism in all its forms." Some- 
how it took me back quite suddenly to the 
days before the war, to ideas that I had 
almost completely forgotten. I suppose 
that in those days the great feature of 
those of us who tried to be " in the forefront 
of modern thought'' was their riotous 
egotism, their anarchical insistence on 
the claims of the individual at the expense 
even of law, order, society, and conven- 
tion. "Self-realization" we considered to 
be the primary duty of every man and 
woman. 

The wife who left her husband, child- 

S 65 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



ren, and home because of her passion for 
another man was a heroine, braving 
the hypocritical judgments of society to 
assert the claims of the individual soul. 
The woman who refused to abandon all 
for love's sake, was not only a coward 
but a criminal, guilty of the deadly sin 
of sacrificing her soul, committing it to 
a prison where it would languish and 
never blossom to its full perfection. The 
man who was bound to uncongenial 
drudgery by the chains of an early mar- 
riage or aged parents dependent on him, 
was the victim of a tragedy which drew 
tears from our eyes. The woman who 
neglected her home because she needed 
a "wider sphere" in which to develop her 
personality was a champion of women's 
rights, a pioneer of enlightenment. And, 
on the other hand, the people who went on 
making the best of uncongenial drudgery, 
or in any way subjected their individu- 
alities to what old-fashioned people called 

66 



THE GOOD SIDE OF "MILITARISM" 

duty, were in our eyes contemptible pol- 
troons. 

It was the same In politics and reli- 
gion. To be loyal to a party or obedient 
to a Church was to stand self-confessed 
a fool or a hypocrite. Self-realization, 
that was in our eyes the whole duty of 
man. 

And then I thought of what I had seen 
only a few days before. First, of bat- 
talions of men marching in the darkness, 
steadily and in step, towards the roar of 
the guns; destined in the next twelve 
hours to charge as one man, without hesi- 
tation or doubt, through barrages of cruel 
shell and storms of murderous bullets. 
Then, the following afternoon, of a handful 
of men, all that was left of about three 
battalions after ten hours of fighting, 
a handful of men exhausted, parched, 
strained, holding on with grim determina- 
tion to the last bit of German trench, 
until they should receive the order to 

67 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



retire. And lastly, on the days and nights 
following, of the constant streams of 
wounded and dead being carried down the 
trench; of the unceasing search that for 
three or four days was never fruitless. 

Self-realization! How far we have 
travelled from the ideals of those pre- 
war days. And as I thought things over 
I wondered at how faint a response that 
phrase, "I loathe militarism in all its 
forms," found in my own mind. 

Before the war I too hated "militarism." 
I despised soldiers as men who had sold 
their birthright for a mess of pottage. 
The sight of the Guards drilling in Wel- 
lington Barracks, moving as one man to 
the command of their drill instructor, 
stirred me to bitter mirth. They were 
not men but manikins. When I first 
enlisted, and for many months after- 
wards, the "mummeries of military dis- 
cipline," the saluting, the meticulous 

uniformity, the rigid suppression of indi- 
es 



THE GOOD SIDE OF "MILITARISM" 

vidual exuberance, chafed and infuriated 
me. I compared it to a ritualistic re- 
ligion, a religion of authority only, 
which depended not on individual assent 
but on tradition for its sanctions. I 
loathed militarism in all its forms. Now 
. . . well, I am inclined to reconsider 
my judgment. Seeing the end of military 
discipline, has shown me something of its 
ethical meaning — more than that, of its 
spiritual meaning. 

For though the part of the "great 
push'' that it fell to my lot to see was 
not a successful part, it was none the less 
a triumph— a spiritual triumph. From 
the accounts of the ordinary war corre- 
spondent I think one hardly realizes 
how great a spiritual triumph it was. 
For the war correspondent only sees the 
outside, and can only describe the out- 
side of things. We who are in the Army, 
who know the men as individuals, who 
have talked with them, joked with them, 

69 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



censored their letters, worked with them, 
lived with them we see below the surface. 
The war correspondent sees the faces of 
the men as they march towards the Valley 
of the Shadow, sees the steadiness of eye 
and mouth, hears the cheery jest. He 
sees them advance into the Valley with- 
out flinching. He sees some of them 
return, tired, dirty, strained, but still 
with a quip for the passer-by. He gives 
us a picture of men without nerves, with- 
out sensitiveness, without imagination, 
schooled to face death as they would face 
rain or any trivial incident of everyday 
life. The "Tommy'' of the war corre- 
spondent is not a human being, but a lay 
figure with a gift for repartee, little more 
than the manikin that we thought him 
in those far-off days before the war, when 
we watched him drilling on the barrack 
square. We soldiers know better. _ We 
know that each one of those men is an 
individual, full of human affections, many 

70 



THE GOOD SIDE OF "MILITARISM" 

of them writing tender letters home every 
week, each one longing with all his soul 
for the end of this hateful business of 
war which divides him from all that he 
loves best in life. We know that every 
one of these men has a healthy individual's 
repugnance to being maimed, and a human 
shrinking from hurt and from the Valley 
of the Shadow of Death. 

The knowledge of all this does not do 
away with the even tread of the troops 
as they pass, the steady eye and mouth, 
the cheery jest; but it makes these a 
hundred times more significant. For we 
know that what these things signify is 
not lack of human aflfectlon, or weak- 
ness, or want of imagination, but some- 
thing superimposed on these, to which 
they are wholly subordinated. Over and 
above the individuality of each man, his 
personal desires and fears and hopes, 
there is the corporate personality of the 
soldier which knows no fear and only one 

71 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



ambition — to defeat the enemy, and so to 
further the righteous cause for which he is 
fighting. In each of those men there is 
this dual personality: the ordinary human 
ego that hates danger and shrinks from 
hurt and death, that longs for home, 
and would welcome the end of the war 
on any terms; and also the stronger 
personality of the soldier who can tol- 
erate but one end to this war, cost what 
that may — the victory of liberty and jus- 
tice, and the utter abasement of brute 
force. 

And when one looks back over the 
months of training that the soldier has 
had, one recognizes how every feature of 
it, though at the time it often seemed 
trivial and ? senseless and irritating, was 
in reality directed to this end. For from 
the moment that a man becomes a soldier 
his dual personality begins. Henceforth 
he is both a man and a soldier. Before 
his training is complete the order must 

72 



THE GOOD. SIDE OF "MILITARISM" 

be reversed, and he must be a soldier and 
a man. As a soldier he must obey and 
salute those whom, as a man, he very- 
likely dislikes and despises. In his con- 
duct he no longer only has to consider 
his reputation as a man, but still more 
his honour as a soldier. In all the condi- 
tions of his life, his dress, appearance, 
food, drink, accommodation, and work, 
his Individual preferences count for no- 
thing, his efficiency as a soldier counts 
for everything. At first he "hates" this, 
and "can't see the point of" that. But 
by the time his training Is complete he 
has realized that whether he hates a 
thing or not, sees the point of a thing or 
not. Is a matter of the uttermost unim- 
portance. If he Is wise, he keeps his likes 
and dislikes to himself. 

All through, his training he Is learn- 
ing the unimportance of his individual- 
ity, realizing that in a national, a world 
crisis, it counts for nothing. On the other 

73 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



hand, he is equally learning that as a unit In 
a fighting force his every action is of the 
utmost importance. The humility which 
the Army inculcates is not an abject self- 
depreciation that leads to loss of self-respect 
and effort. Substituted for the old indivi- 
dualism is a new self-consciousness. The 
man has become humble, but in proportion 
the soldier has become exceeding proud. 
The old personal whims and ambitions 
give place to a corporate ambition and 
purpose, and this unity of will is symbol- 
ized in action by the simultaneous exacti- 
tude of drill, and in dress by the rigid 
identity of uniform. Anything which calls 
attention to the individual, whether in 
drill or in dress, is a crime, because it 
is essential that the soldier's individual- 
ity should be wholly subordinated to the 
corporate personality of the regiment. 

As I said before, the personal humility 
of the soldier has nothing in it of abject 
self-depreciation or slackness. On the 

74 



THE GOOD SIDE OF "MILITARISM" 

contrary, every detail of his appearance, 
and every most trivial feature of his duty 
assumes an immense significance. Slack- 
ness in his dress and negligence in his 
work are military crimes. In a good regi- 
ment the soldier is striving after perfection 
all the time. 

And it is when he comes to the supreme 
test of battle that the fruits of his train- 
ing appear. The good soldier has learnt 
the hardest lesson of all — the lesson of 
self-subordination to a higher and bigger 
personality. He has learnt to sacrifice 
everything which belongs to him individu- 
ally to a cause that is far greater than 
any personal ambitions of his own can 
ever be. He has learnt to do this so 
thoroughly that he knows no fear — for 
fear is personal. He has learnt to "hate" 
father and mother and life itself for the 
sake of — though he may not call it that — 
the Kingdom of God on earth. 

It is a far cry from the old days when 

75 



A STUDENT IN AEMS 



one talked of self-realization, isn't it? 
I make no claim to be a good soldier; but 
I think that perhaps I may be beginning 
to be one; for if I am asked now whether 
I "loathe militarism in all its forms/' I 
think that "the answer is in the negative," 
I will even go farther, and say that I hope 
that some of the discipline and self-sub- 
ordination that have availed to send men 
calmly to their death in war, will survive 
in the days of peace, and make of those 
who are left better citizens, better work- 
men, better servants of the State, better 
Church men. j 



76 



A MONTH'S REFLECTIONS 



77 



IV 

A MONTH'S REFLECTIONS 

Timothy and I are on detachment. We 
are billeted with M. le Cure, and we mess 
at the schoolmaster's. Hence we are on 
good terms with all parties, for of course a 
good schoolmaster shrugs his shoulders at a 
priest, and a good priest returns the compli- 
ment. In war time, however, the hatchet 
seems to be buried pretty deep. We have 
not seen it sticking out anywhere. 

M. le Cure has a beautiful rose garden, 
a cask of excellent cider, a passable Sauterne, 
and a charming pony. He is a good fellow, 
I should think, though without much edu- 
cation. His house — or what I have seen 
of it — is the exact opposite of what an 
English country vicar's would be. The 

79 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



only sitting-room that I have seen is as 
neat as an old maid's. There is a polished 
floor, an oval polished table on which repose 
four large albums at regular intervals, each 
on its own little mat. There is a mantel- 
piece with gilt candlesticks and an ornate 
clock under a glass dome. Round the walls 
are photographs of brother clergy, the 
place of honour being assigned to a stout 
Chanoine, The chairs are stiff and un- 
comfortable. One of them, which is more 
imposing and uncomfortable than the 
rest, is obviously for the Bishop when he 
comes. There are no papers, no books, 
no ash-trays, no confusion. I have never 
seen M. le Cure sit there. I fancy he 
lives in the kitchen and in his garden. 

Timothy sleeps in the bed which the 
Bishop uses, and is told he ought to feel 
tres saint. 

The wife of the schoolmaster cooks for 
us. She is an excellent soul. We give 
her full marks. She has a smile and an 

80 



A MONTH'S REFLECTIONS 



omelette for every emergency, and waves 
aside all Timothy's vagaries with "Ah, 
monsieur, la jeunesse!" I am not sure 
that Timothy quite likes it! 

Timothy is immense. He is that rarest 
of birds, a wholly delightful egotist. He 
is the sun, but we all bask and shine with 
reflected glory. The men are splendid, 
because they are his men. I am a great 
success because I am his subaltern. For- 
tunately we all have a sense of humour 
and so are highly pleased with ourselves 
and each other. After all, if one is a 
Captain at twenty-two . . .! But he's a 
good soldier, too, and we all believe in 
him. Timothy's all right, in spite of la 
jeunesse! 

• •••••• 

Rain! The men are fifteen in a tent 

in a sea of mud. Poor beggars! They 

are having a thin time. Working parties 

in the trenches day and night; every one 

soaked to the skin; and then a return 
e 81 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



to a damp, crowded, muddy tent. No 
pay, no smokes, and yet they are won- 
derfully cheery, and all think that the 
"Push" IS going to end the war. I wish 
I thought so! 

• • • • • •' • 

These rats are the limit! The dug- 
out swarms with them. Last night they 
ate half my biscuits and a good part of 
Timothy's clean socks, and whenever I 
began to get to sleep one of them would run 
across my face, or some other sensitive part 
of my anatomy, and wake me up. I shall 
leave the candle alight to-night, to see if that 
keeps them away. 

• • • • • • • 

Last night the rats tried to eat the candle, 
and very nearly set me on fire. If it were 
not for the rain I would try the firestep. 

The men are having a rotten time again 
— no proper shelter from the rain, and 
short rations, to say nothing of remarkably 
good practice by the Boche artillery. C , 

82 



A MONTH'S REFLECTIONS 



just out from England, got scuppered this 
afternoon. A good boy — made his com- 
munion just before we came in. I suppose 
he didn't know much about it, and that he 
is really better off now; but at the same time 
it makes one angry. 

• •••••• 

The rain has lifted, so last night I tried 
the firestep, and got a good sleep. The 
absurd thing was that I couldn't wake up 
properly. I came on duty at midnight, was 
roused, got to my feet, and started to walk 
along the trench. And then the Nameless 
Terror, that lurks in dark corners when one 
is a small boy, gripped me. I was fright- 
ened of the dark, filled with a sense of 
impending disaster! It took about ten 
minutes to wake properly and shake it off. 
I must try to get more sleep somehow; but 
it is jolly difficult. 

The great bombardment has begun, the 
long-promised strafing of the Boche. Accord- 

83 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



ing to the gunners they will all be dead, 
buried, or dazed when the time comes for 
us to go over the top. I doubt it! If 
they have enough deep dug-outs I don't 
fancy that the bombardment will worry 
them very much. 

• •••••• 

Now we are at rest for a day or two 
before the Push. I am to be left out — 
in charge of carriers. Damn! I might 
as well be A. S. C. I see myself counting 
ration bags while the battalion is charging 
with fixed bayonets; and in the evening 
sending up parties of weary laden carriers 
over shell-swept areas, while I myself 
stay behind at the Dump. Damn! Damn!! 
Damn!!! Then I shall receive ironical 
congratulations on my "cushy" job. 

• •••••• 

Have just seen the battalion off. I 
don't start for another five hours. I loathe 
war. It is futile, idiotic. I would gladly be 
out of the Army to-morrow. Glory is a 

84 



A MONTH'S REFLECTIONS 



painted idol, honour a phantasy, rehgion a 
delusion. We wallow in blood and torture 
to please a creature of our imagination. We 
are no better than South Sea Islanders. 
• •••••• 

Just here the attack was a failure. When 
I got to the Dump I found the battalion 
still there. By an irony of fate I was the 
only officer of my company to set foot in the 
German lines. After a day of idleness and 
depression I had to detail a party to carry 
bombs at top speed to some relics of the lead- 
ing battalions, who were still clinging to 
the extremest corner of the enemy's front 
line some distance to our left. Being fed 
up with inaction, I took the party myself. 
It was a long way. The trenches were 
choked with wounded and stragglers and 
troops who had never been ordered to 
advance. In many places they were broken 
down by shell-fire. In others they were 
waist-deep in water. By dint of much 
shouting and shoving and cursing I man- 

85 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



aged to get through with about ten of my 
men, but had to leave the others to follow 
with a sergeant. 

At last we sighted our objective, a cluster 
of chalk mounds surrounded with broken 
wire, shell craters, corpses, wreathed in 
smoke, dotted with men. I think we all ran 
across the ground between our front line 
and our objective, though it must have 
been more or less dead ground. Anyhow, 
only one man was hit. When we got close 
the scene was absurdly like a conventional 
battle picture — the sort of picture that one 
never believes in for a minute. There was a 
wild mixture of regiments — Jocks, Irishmen, 
Territorials, etc., etc. There was no proper 
trench left. There were rifles, a machine 
gun, a Lewis rifle, and bombs all going at the 
same time. There were wounded men sit- 
ting in a kind of helpless stupor; there were 
wounded trying to drag themselves back to 
our own lines ; there were the dead of whom 
no one took any notice. But the prevailing 

86 



A MONTH'S REFLECTIONS 



note was one of utter weariness coupled 
with dogged tenacity. 

Here and there were men who were self- 
conscious, wondering what would become 
of themselves. I was one of them, and we 
were none the better for it. Most of the 
fellows, though, had forgotten themselves. 
They no longer flinched, or feared. They 
had got beyond that. They were just set 
on clinging to that mound and keeping the 
Huns at bay until their oflScer gave the word 
to retire. Their spirit was the spirit of the 
oarsman, the runner, or the footballer, who 
has strained himself to the utmost, who if 
he stopped to wonder whether he could go 
on or not would collapse; but who, because 
he does not stop to wonder, goes on miracu- 
lously long after he should, by all the 
laws of nature, have succumbed to sheer 
exhaustion. 

Having delivered my bombs into eager 
hands, I reported to the officer who seemed 
to be in charge, and asked if I could do 

87 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



anything. I must frankly admit that my 
one hope was that he would not want me 
to stay. He began to say how that morning 
he had reached his objective, and how for 
lack of support on his flank, for lack of 
bombs, for lack of men, he had been forced 
back; and how for eight hours he had dis- 
puted every inch of ground till now his men 
could only cling to these mounds with the 
dumb mechanical tenacity of utter exhaus- 
tion. "You might go to H. Q.," he said 
at last, "and tell them where I am, and that 
I can't hold on without ammunition and a 
barrage. '' 

I am afraid that I went with joy on 
that errand. I did not want to stay on 
those chalk mounds. 



I only saw a very little bit of the battle. 
Thank God it has gone well elsewhere; 
but here we are where we started. Day and 
night we have done nothing but bring in 
the wounded and the dead. When one sees 

88 



A MONTH'S REFLECTIONS 



the dead, their limbs crushed and mangled, 
their features distorted and blackened, one 
can only have repulsion for war. It is easy 
to talk of glory and heroism when one is 
away from it, when memory has softened 
the gruesome details. But here, in the 
presence of the mutilated and tortured 
dead, one can only feel the horror and 
wickedness of war. Indeed it is an evil 
harvest, sown of pride and arrogance and 
lust of power. Maybe through all this 
evil and pain we shall be purged of many 
sins. God grant it! If ever there were 
martyrs, some of these were martyrs, 
facing death and torture as ghastly as any 
that confronted the saints of old, and 
facing it with but little of that fierce fanati- 
cal exaltation of faith that the early Chris- 
tians had to help them. 

For these were mostly quiet souls, loving 
their wives and children and the little com- 
forts of home life most of all, little stirred by 

great emotions or passions. Yet they had 

so 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



• 



some love for liberty, some faith in God, — 
not a high and flaming passion, but a quiet 
insistent conviction. It was enough to 
send them out to face martyrdom, though 
their lack of imagination left them merci- 
fully ignorant of the extremity of its 
terrors. It was enough, when they saw 
their danger in its true perspective, to 
keep them steadfast and tenacious. 
For them "it is finished." R. L P. 



90 



ROMANCE 



91 



V 

ROMANCE 

I SUPPOSE that there are very few officers 
or men who have been at the front for any 
length of time who would not be secretly, 
if not openly, relieved and delighted if 
they "got a cushy one" and found them- 
selves en route for "Blighty''; yet in many 
ways soldiering at the front is infinitely 
preferable to soldiering at home. One of 
the factors which count most heavily in 
favour of the front, is the extraordinary 
affection of officers for their men. 

In England, officers hardly know their 
men. They live apart, only meet on par- 
ade, and their intercourse is carried on 
through the prescribed channels. Even if 
you do get keen on a particular squad of 

93 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



recruits, or a particular class of would-be 
bombers, you lose them so soon that your 
enthusiasm never ripens into anything like 
intimacy. But at the front you have your 
own pLtoon; and week after week, month 
after month, you are living in the closest 
proximity; you see them all day, you get to 
know the character of each individual man 
and boy, and the result in nearly every 
case is this extraordinary affection of which 
I have spoken. 

You will find it in the most unlikely 
subjects. I have heard a Major, a Regular 
with, as I thought, a good deal of regimental 
stiffness, talk about his men with a voice 
almost choked with emotion. "When you 
see what they have to put up with, and how 
amazingly cheery they are through it all, you 
feel that you can't do enough for them. 
They make you feel that you're not fit to 
black their boots. " And then he went on to 
tell how it was often the fellows whom in 
England you had despaired of, fellows who 

94 



ROMANCE 



were always "up at orders/' who out at the 
front became your right-hand men, the men 
on whom you found yourself relying. 

I had a letter not long ago from a gunner 
Captain, also a Regular, who has been 
out almost since the beginning of the war. 
He wrote: *'One of my best friends has 
just been killed"; and the "best friend" 
was not the fellow he had known at "the 
shop," or played polo with in India, or 
hunted with in Ireland, but a scamp of 
a telephonist, who had stolen his whisky 
and owned up; who had risked his life 
for him, who had been a fellow-sportsman 
who could be relied on in a tight corner 
in the most risky of all games. 

There is indeed a glamour and a pathos 
about the private soldier, especially when, 
as so often happens, he is really only a 
boy. When you meet him in the trenches, 
wet, covered with mud, with tired eyes 
speaking of long watches and hours of 
risky work, he never fails to greet you 

95 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



with a smile, and you love him for it, 
and feel that nothing you can do can 
make up to him for it. For you have 
slept in a much more comfortable place 
than he has. You have had unlimited 
tobacco and cigarettes. You have had 
a servant to cook for you. You have 
fared sumptuously compared with him. 
You don't feel his superior. You don't 
want to be "gracious without undue famili- 
arity. " Exactly what you want to do is 
a bit doubtful — the Major said he wanted 
to black his boots for him, and that is per- 
haps the best way of expressing it. 

When he goes over the top and works 
away in front of the parapet with the 
moon shining full and the machine guns 
busy all along; when he gets back to billets, 
and throws off his cares and bathes and 
plays games like any irresponsible school- 
boy; even when he breaks bounds and is 

found by the M. P. skylarking in , 

you can't help loving him. Most of all, 

96 



ROMANCE 



when he lies still and white with a red stream 
trickling from where the sniper's bullet has 
made a hole through his head, there comes a 
lump in your throat that you can't swallow; 
and you turn away so that you shan't have 
to wipe the tears from your eyes. 

Gallant souls, those boys, and all the 
more gallant because they hate war so 
much. Their nerves quiver when a shell or 
a "Minnie" falls into the trench near them, 
and then they smile to hide their weak- 
ness. They hate going over the parapet 
when the machine guns are playing; so 
they don't hesitate, but plunge over with 
a smile to hide their fears. Their cure 
for every mental worry is a smile, their 
answer to every prompting of fear is a 
plunge. They have no philosophy or 
fanaticism to help them — only the sport- 
ing instinct which is in every healthy 
British boy. 

Then there are **the old men," less 
attractive, less stirring to the imagination, 

7 97 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



less sensitive, but wlio grow upon you 
more and more as you get to know them. 
Any one over twenty-three or so is an 
''old man/* They have lost the grace, the 
irresponsibility, the sensibility of youth. 
Their eyes and mouths are steadier, their 
movements more deliberate. But they are 
the fellows whom you would choose for a 
patrol, or a raid, where a cool head and a 
stout heart are what is wanted. It takes 
you longer to know these. They are less 
responsive to your advances. But when 
you have tested them and they have tested 
you, you know that you have that which is 
stronger than any terror of night or day, a 
loyalty which nothing can shake. 

And then when he thinks how little 
he deserves all this love and loyalty, the 
subaltern's heart aches with a feeling that 
can find no expression either in word or 
deed. 

This is a tale that has often been told, 
and that people in England know by 



98 



ROMANCE 



heart. It cannot be told too often. It 
cannot be learnt too well. For the time 
will come when we shall need to remember 
it, and when it will be easy to forget. Will 
you remember it, ye people, when the 
boy has become a man, and the soldier 
has become a workman? But there are 
other tales to tell. There are the tales 
of the sergeant-major and the sergeants, 
the corporals and the "lance-jacks." 
Sergeant-majors, sergeants, and corporals 
are not romantic figures. If you think of 
them at all, you probably think of rum- 
jars and profanity. Yet they are the 
very backbone of the Army. I have been 
a sergeant and I have been a private sol- 
dier, and I know that the latter has much 
the better time of the two. He at least ^has 
the kind of liberty which belongs to utter 
irresponsibility. If he breaks bounds in 
the exuberance of his spirits, no one thinks 
much worse of him as long as he does not 
make a song about paying the penalty! 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



Of course he has to be punished. So 
many days of sleeping in the guard tent, 
extra fatigues, pack-drill, and perhaps a 
couple of hours tied up, as an example to 
evil-doers. But if he has counted the 
cost, and pays the price with a grin, we 
just say "Young scamp!" and dismiss the 
matter. But if a sergeant or a corporal 
does the same, that's a very diflferent 
matter. He has shown himself unfit for 
his job. He has betrayed a trust. We 
cannot forgive him. Responsibility has 
its disadvantages. The senior N. C. O. gets 
no relaxation from discipline. In the line 
and out of it he must always be watch- 
ful, self-controlled, orderly. He must never 
wink. These men have not the glamour 
of the boy private; but their high sense of 
duty and discipline, their keenness and 
efficiency, merit all the honour that we 
can give them. 

Finally — for it would not do for a sub- 
altern to discuss his superiors — we come 

100 



ROMANCE 



to the junior officer. Somehow I fancy 
that in the public eye he too is a less roman- 
tic figure than the private. One does not 
associate him with privations and hard- 
ships, but with parcels from home. Well, 
it is quite right. He has such a much less 
uncomfortable time than his men that he 
does not deserve or want sympathy on that 
score. He is better off in every way. 
He has better quarters, better food, more 
kit, a servant, and in billets far greater 
liberty. And yet there is many a man 
who is now an officer who looks back 
on his days as a private with regret. 
Could he have his time over again . . . 
yes, he would take a commission; but 
he would do so, not with any thought 
for the less hardship of it, but from a stern 
sense of duty — the sense of duty which 
does not allow a man with any self-respect 
to refuse to shoulder a heavier burden when 
called upon to do so. 

Those apparently irresponsible subalterns 

101 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



whom you see entertaining their lady 
friends at the Carlton or Giro's do, when 
they are at the front, have very heavy 
responsibilities. Even in the ordinary 
routine of trench life, so many decisions 
have to be made, with the chance of a 
** telling off whichever way you choose, 
and the lives of other men hanging in the 
balance. Suppose you are detailed for a 
wiring party, and you arrive to find a full 
moon beaming sardonically down at you. 
What are you to do? If you go out you 
may be seen. Half a dozen of your men 
may be mown down by a machine gun. 
You will be blamed and will blame your- 
self for not having decided to remain 
behind the parapet. If you do not go 
out you may set a precedent, and night 
after night the work will be postponed, 
till at last it is too late, and the Hun has 
got through, and raided the trench. If 
you hesitate or ask advice you are lost. 
You have to make up your mind in an 

102 



ROMANCE 



instant, and to stand by it. If you waver 
your men will never have confidence in 
you again. 

Still more in a push; a junior subaltern 
is quite likely to find himself at any time 
in command of a company, while he may 
for a day even have to command the relics 
of a battalion. I have seen boys almost 
fresh from a Public School, in whose faces 
there were two personalities expressed: the 
one full of the lighthearted, reckless, irre- 
sponsible vitality of boyhood, and the other 
scarred with the anxious lines of one to 
whom a couple of hundred exhausted and 
nerve-shattered men have looked, and not 
looked in vain, for leadership and strength 
in their grim extremity. From a boy in 
such a position is required something far 
more difficult than personal courage. If we 
praise the boy soldier for his smile in 
the face of shells and machine guns, don't 
let us forget to praise still more the boy 
officer who, in addition to facing death on 

103 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



his own account, has to bear the respon- 
sibility of the Hves of a hundred other men. 
There is many a man of undoubted courage 
whose nerve would fail to bear that strain. 
A day or two ago I was reading Romance^ 
by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueflfer. 
It is a glorious tale of piracy and adventure 
in the West Indies; but for the moment 
1 wondered how it came about that Con- 
rad, the master of psychology, should have 
helped to write such a book. And then 
I understood. For these boys who hate 
the war, and suffer and endure with the 
smile that is sometimes so difficult, and 
long with a great longing for home and 
peace — some day some of them will look 
back on these days and will tell them- 
selves that after all it was Romance, the 
adventure, which made their lives worth 
while. And they will long to feel once 
again the stirring of the old comrade- 
ship and love and loyalty, to dip their 
clasp-knives into the same pot of jam, and 

104 



ROMANCE 



lie in the same dug-out, and work on the 
same bit of wire with the same machine gun 
striking secret terror into their hearts, and 
look into each other's eyes for the same 
courageous smile. For Romance, after 
all, is woven of the emotions, especially 
the elemental ones of love and loyalty and 
fear and pain. 

We men are never content! In the 
dull routine of normal life we sigh for 
Romance, and sometimes seek to create 
it artificially, stimulating spurious pas- 
sions, plunging into muddy depths in 
search of it. Now we have got it we 
sigh for a quiet life. But some day those 
who have not died will say: "Thank God 
I have lived! I have loved, and endured, 
and trembled, and trembling, dared. I 
have had my Romance. '' 



105 



IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 



107 



VI 

IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 



Scene. A field in Flanders," All round 
the edge are bivouacs^ built of sticks 
and waterproof sheets. Three men are 
squatting round a small fire, waiting 
for a couple of mess-tins of water to 
boil. 

Bill {gloomily). The last three of the 
old lot! Oo's turn next? 

Fred. Wot's the bleedin' good of bein' 
dahn in the mahf abaht it? Give me the 
bleedin' 'ump, you do. 

Jim. Are we dahn-'earted ? Not 'alf, 
we ain't ! 

109 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



Bill. I don't know as I cares. Git it 
over, I sez. 'Ave done wiv it! I dessay 
as them wot's gone West is better off nor 
wot we are, arter all. 

Jim. Orlright, old sport, you go an* 
look for the V. C, and we'll pick up the 
bits an' bury 'em nice an' deep! 

Bill. If this 'ere bleedin' war don't 
finish soon that's wot I bleedin' well will 
go an' do. Wish they'd get a move on 
an' finish it. 

Fred. If ever I gets 'ome agin, I'll 
never do another stroke in my natural. 

The old woman can keep me, 'er, an' if 

she don't I'll— well— 'er . 

Jim {indignantly). Nice sort o' bloke 
you are! Arter creatin' abaht ole Bill 
makin' you miserable, you goes on to 
plan 'ow you'll make other folks miser- 
able! Wot's the bleedin' good o' that? 
Keep smilin', I sez, an' keep other folks 
smilin' too, if you can. If ever I gets 

'ome I'll go dahn on my bended, I will, 

no 



IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

and I'll be a different sort o' bloke to 
wot I been afore. Swelp me, Bob, I will! 
My missus won't 'ave no cause to wish 
as I've been done in. 

Bill. Ah well, it don't much matter. 
We're all most like to go afore this war's 
finished. 

Jim. If yer goes yer goes, and that's 
all abaht it. A bloke's got to go some 
day, and fer myself I'd as soon get done 
in doin' my dooty as I would die in my 
bed. I ain't struck on dyin' afore my 
time, and I don't know as I'm greatly 
struck on livin', but, whichever it is, you 
got ter make the best on it. 

Bill {meditatively), I woulden mind 
stoppin' a bullet fair an' square; but I 
woulden like one of them 'orrible lingerin' 
deaths. " Died o' wounds " arter six munfs' 
mortal hagony — that's wot gets at me. Git 
it over an' done wiv, I sez. 

Fred {querulously). Ow, chuck it. Bill. 

You gives me the creeps, you do. 

Ill 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



Jim. I knowed a bloke onest in civil 
life wot died a lingerin* death. Lived 
in the second-floor back in the same *ouse 
as me an' my missus, 'e did. Suffered 
somefink' 'orrible, 'e did, an' lingered 
more nor five year. Yet I reckon 'e was 
one o' the best blokes as ever I come acrost. 
Went to 'eaven straight, 'e did, if ever any 
one did. Wasn't 'alf glad ter go, neither. 
" I done my bit of 'ell, Jim, " 'e sez to me, an' 
looked that 'appy you'd a' thought as 'e 
was well agin. Shan't never forget 'is face, 
I shan't. An' I'd sooner be that bloke, for 
all 'is sufferin's, than I'd be old Fred 'ere, 
an' live to a 'undred. 

Bill {philosophically), You'm right, 
matey. This is a wale o' tears, as the 
'ymn sez, and them as is out on it is best 
off, if so be as they done their dooty in 
that state o' life . . . Where's the corfee, 
Jim .? The water's on the bile. 



112 



THE FEAR OF DEATH IN WAR 



113 



VII 

THE FEAR OF DEATH IN WAR 

I AM not a psychologist, and I have not 
seen many people die In their beds; but 
I think it Is established that very few 
people are afraid of a natural death when 
it comes to the test. Often they are so 
weak that they are Incapable of emotion. 
Sometimes they are In such physical pain 
that death seems a welcome deliverer. 

But a violent death such as death In 
battle Is obviously a different matter. 
It comes to a man when he Is In the full 
possession of his health and vigour, and 
when every physical Instinct Is urging 
him to self-preservation. If a man feared 
death In such circumstances one could not 
be surprised, and yet In the present war 

115 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



hundreds of thousands of men have gone 
to meet practically certain destruction 
without giving a sign of terror. 

The fact Is that at the moment of a charge 
men are In an absolutely abnormal condi- 
tion. I do not know how to describe their 
condition in scientific terms; but there 
Is a sensation of tense excitement com- 
bined with a sort of uncanny calm. Their 
emotions seem to be numbed. Noises, 
sights, and sensations which would ordina- 
rily produce Intense pity, horror, or dread, 
have no effect on them at all, and yet 
never was their mind clearer, their sight, 
hearing, etc, more acute. They notice all 
sorts of little details which would ordina- 
rily pass them by, but which now thrust 
themselves on their attention with absurd 
definlteness — absurd because so utterly 
incongruous and meaningless. Or they sud- 
denly remember with extraordinary clear- 
ness some trivial incident of their past life, 
hitherto unremembered, and not a bit worth 

116 



THE FEAR OF DEATH IN WAR 

remembering! But with the issue before 
them, with victory or death or the prospect 
of eternity, their minds blankly refuse to 
come to grips. 

No; it is not at the moment of a charge 
that men fear death. As in the case of 
those who die in bed. Nature has an an- 
aesthetic ready for the emergency. It is 
before an attack that a man is more liable 
to fear — ^before his blood is hot, and while he 
still has leisure to think. The trouble may 
begin a day or two in advance, when he is 
first told of the attack which is likely to 
mean death to himself and so many of his 
chums. This part is comparatively easy. 
It is fairly easy to be philosophic if one 
has plenty of time. One indulges in regrets 
about the home one may never see again. 
One is rather sorry for oneself; but such self- 
pity is not wholly unpleasant. One feels 
mildly heroic, which is not wholly dis- 
agreeable either. Very few men are afraid 
of death in the abstract. Very few men 

117 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



believe in hell, or are tortured by their 
consciences. They are doubtful about after- 
death, hesitating between a belief in eternal 
oblivion and a belief in a new life under 
the same management as the present; and 
neither prospect fills them with terror. 
If only one's "people'' would be sensible, 
one would not mind. 

But as the hour approaches when the 
attack is due to be launched the strain 
becomes more tense. The men are pro- 
bably cooped up in a very small space. 
Movement is very restricted. Matches 
must not be struck. Voices must be hushed 
to a whisper. Shells bursting and machine 
guns rattling bring home the grim reality of 
the affair. It is then more than at any other 
time in an attack that a man has to "face 
the spectres of the mind, " and lay them if 
he can. Few men care for those hours of 
waiting. 

Of all the hours of dismay that come to a 
soldier there are really few more trying to 

118 ' 



THE FEAR OF DEATH IN WAR 

the nerves than when he is sitting in a trench 
under heavy fire from high-expIosive shells 
or bombs from trench mortars. You can 
watch these bombs lobbed up Into the 
air. You see them slowly wobble down to 
earth, there to explode with a terrific 
detonation that sets every nerve In your 
body a-jangllng. You can do nothing. 
You cannot retaliate in any way. You 
simply have to sit tight and hope for the 
best. Some men joke and smile; but 
their mirth is forced. Some feign stoical 
indifference, and sit with a paper and a 
pipe; but as a rule their pipes are out and 
their reading a pretence. There are few 
men, indeed, whose hearts are not beating 
faster, and whose nerves are not on edge. 
But you can't call this "the fear of 
death''; it is a purely physical reaction 
of danger and detonation. It is not fear 
of death as death. It is not fear of hurt 
as hurt. It is an infinitely intensified dislike 
of suspense and uncertainty, sudden noise 

119 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



and shock. It belongs wholly to the phy- 
sical organism, and the only cure that I 
know is to make an act of personal disso- 
ciation from the behaviour of one's flesh. 
Your teeth may chatter and your knees 
quake, but as long as the real you dis- 
approves and derides this absurdity of the 
flesh, the composite you can carry on. 
Closely allied to the sensation of nameless 
dread caused by high explosives is that 
caused by gas. No one can carry out a 
relief in the trenches without a certain 
anxiety and dread if he knows that the 
enemy has gas cylinders in position and 
that the wind is in the east. But this, 
again, is not exactly the fear of death ; but 
much more a physical reaction to uncer- 
tainty and suspense combined with the 
threat of physical suffering. 

Personally, I believe that very few men 
indeed fear death. The vast majority 
experience a more or less violent physical 
shrinking from the pain of death and 

120 



THE FEAR OF DEATH IN WAR 

wounds, especially when they are obliged 
to be physically Inactive, and when they 
have nothing else to think about. This 
kind of dread Is, In the case of a good 
many men, intensified by darkness and 
suspense, and by the deafening noise and 
shock that accompany the detonation of 
high explosives. But it cannot properly 
be called the fear of death, and It Is a 
purely physical reaction which can be, and 
nearly always is, controlled by the mind. 

Last of all there is the repulsion and 
loathing for the whole business of war, 
with its bloody ruthlessness. Its fiend- 
ish ingenuity, and its insensate cruelty, 
that comes to a man after a battle, when 
the tortured and dismembered dead lie 
strewn about the trench, and the wounded 
groan from No-Man's-Land. But neither 
is that the fear of death. It is a repulsion 
which breeds hot anger more often than cold 
fear, reckless hatred of life more often than 
abject clinging to It. 

121 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



The cases where any sort of fear, even 
for a moment, obtains the mastery of a 
man are very rare. Sometimes in the case 
of a boy, whose nerves are more sensitive 
than a man's, and whose habit of self- 
control is less formed, a sudden shock 
will upset his mental balance. Sometimes 
a very egotistical man will succumb to 
danger long drawn out. The same applies 
to men who are very introspective. I 
have seen a man of obviously low intelli- 
gence break down on the eve of an attack. 
The anticipation of danger makes many 
men "windy,'' especially officers who are 
responsible for other lives than their own. 
But even where men are afraid it is generally 
not death that they fear. Their fear is a 
physical and instinctive shrinking from hurt, 
shock, and the unknown, which instinct 
obtains the mastery only through sur- 
prise, or through the exhaustion of the 
mind and will, or through a man being 
excessively self-centred. It is not the 

122 



THE FEAR OF DEATH IN WAR 

fear of death rationally considered; but 
an irrational physical instinct which all 
men possess, but which almost all can 
control. 



123 



IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 



125 



VIII 

IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 
II 

Scene. A dug-out in a wood somewhere in 
Flanders, Officers at tea. 

Hancock. Damned glad to be out of 
that infernal firing trench, anyway. {A 
dull report is heard injhe distance.) There 
goes another torpedo! Wonder who's copt 
it this time ! 

Smith. For Christ's sake talk about 
something else! 

Hancock {ignoring him). Are we com- 
ing back to the same trenches, sir? 

Captain Dodd. 'Spect so. 

Hancock. At the present rate we shall 

127 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



last another two spells. I hate this sort 
of bisnay. You go on month after month 
losing fellows the whole time, and at the 
end of it you're exactly where you started. 
I wish they'd get a move on. 

Whiston. Tired of life ? 

Hancock. If you call this life, yes! 
If this damned war is going on another 
two years, I hope to God I don't live to 
see the end of it. 

Smith. If ever I get home . . .1 

Whiston. Well? 

Smith. Won't I paint the town red, 
that's all! 

Whiston. If ever I get home . . . well, 
I guess I'll go home. No more razzle- 
dazzle for master! No, there's a little girl 
awaiting, and I know she thinks of me. 
Shan't wait any longer. 

Hancock {heavily). Don't think a chap's 
got any right to marry a girl under present 
circs. It's ten to one she's a widow before 
she's a mother. 

128 



IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

Smith. Oh, shut up ! 
Captain Dodd {gently). To some wo- 
men the kid would be just the one thing 
that made life bearable. 

Hancock {reddening). Sorry, sir; for- 
got you'd just done it. Course you're 
right. Depends absolutely on the girl. 

Captain Dopd. Thanks. I say, Whis- 
ton, I'm going to B. H. Q. Care to come 
along ? 

{They go out together,) 
Scene. A path through a wood. Cap- 
tain Dodd and Whiston walking to- 
gether, followed by a Lance-Cor- 
poral. 

Dodd. D'you believe in presentiments, 
Whiston \ 

Whiston {doubtfully). A year ago I 
should have laughed at you for asking. 
Now . . . 

Dodd. More things in heaven and 
earth . . .? 

129 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



Whiston. My rationalism is always be- 
ing upset! 

DoDD. How exactly? 

Whiston. For instance, I simply can't 
believe that old John is finished. Can 
you? 

DoDD {quietly). No. 

Whiston. Funny thing. As far as I'm 
concerned I can quite imagine myself 
just snuffing out. You can put one word 
on my grave, if I have one — "Napu." 
But as for John, no. I want something 
else. Something about Death being scored 
off after all. 

DoDD. I know. "0 Death, where is thy 
sting? Grave, where is thy victory?" 

Whiston. Just that. Mind you, I 
don't think I'm afraid of Death. I don't 
want to get killed. But if I saw him 
coming I think I could smile, and feel 
that after all he wasn't getting much of 
a bargain. But the idea of his getting 
old John sticks in my gullet. I believe in 

130 



IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

all sorts of things for him. Resurrection 
and life and Heaven, and all that. 

DoDD. What do you think about it, 
Corporal ? 

Lance-Corporal. Same as Mr. Whis- 
ton, sir. 

Whiston. But what about presenti- 
ments ? 

DoDD. Oh, I don't know. Funny thing; 
but all through this fortnight IVe been 
absolutely certain that I was not for it. 

Lance-Corporal. Beg pardon, sir, we 
noticed that, sir! 

Whiston. Well, it's practically over 
now. 

DoDD. Tm not so sure. Fm not in 
a funk, you know. It's simply that I 
don't feel so sure. 

Whiston. Oh, rot, sir! I don't be- 
lieve in that sort of presentiment. 

DoDD. What do you think, Corporal ? 

Lance-Corporal. I think you goes 
when your time comes, sir. But it won't 

131 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



come to-night, sir. Not after all we been 
through this spell, and the spell just 
finished. 

DoDD. I believe you're right. Corporal. 
We shall go when our time comes, and not 
before. I like that idea, you know. It 
means one hasn't got to worry. 

Whiston. If it means that you go on as 
you've done the last fortnight, it's a dam- 
nable doctrine, sir. You've no business to 
go taking unnecessary risks simply because 
you've got bitten by Mohammedanism. 

DoDD {thoughtfully). You're right, too, 
Whiston. "Thou shalt not tempt the 
Lord thy God." One shouldn't take un- 
necessary risks. Mind you, I don't admit 
that I have. It just enables one to do 
one's job with a quiet mind, that's all. 

Two Days Later 
Scene. A billet. Hancock and Smith. 

Hancock. Damn ! 

132 



IMAGINAHY CONVERSATIONS 

Smith. What's up? Aren't you satis- 
fied? The brigade's bound to go back 
and re-form now, and that means that we 
shan't be in the trenches for a couple of 
months at least. We may even go where 
there's a pretty girl or two. My word! 

Hancock. Damnation! 

Smith {genuinely astonished). What the 
hell's wrong? Any one would think you 
liked the trenches! Personally, I don't 
care if I never see them again. England's 
full of nice young, bright young things cry- 
ing to get out. Let 'em all come! They 
can have my job and welcome ! 

Hancock {to himself). God! Why 
Dodd and Whiston? Why, why, why? 
Why not me? Why just the fellows we 
can't afford to lose ? 

Smith. Oh, for God's sake stow it! 
What the hell's the good of going on like 
that ? Of course I'm sorry for them and all 
that. But I don't see that It's going to help 
them to make oneself miserable about it. 

133 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



Hancock {fiercely). Sorry for them! 
It's not them I'm sorry for! They . . . 
they're the lucky ones! God! I suppose 
that's the answer! They'd earned it! 

Smith {satirically). Have you turned 
pi? We shall have you saying the prayers 
that you learnt at your mother's knee next, 
I suppose! I shall have to tell the Padre, 
and he'll preach a sermon about It! I 
should never have thought you would have 
been frightened into religion ! 

Hancock. Frightened! You little 
swine! You talk about being frightened 
after last night! I tell you I'd rather 
be lying out there with Dodd and Whiston 
than be sitting here with you. Fright- 
ened into religion! 

Smith. Oh, I suppose you're the next 
candidate for death or glory! Good luck 
to you! I'm not competing. I'll do my 
job; but I'm not going to make a fool of 
myself. Dodd and Whiston deserved all 
they got. You're right there. You'll get 

134 



IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

what you deserve some day, I expect! 
Don't look at me like that. I've said 
I'm sorry, and all that. But it's the 
truth I'm speaking, all the same. 

Hancock. And you'll get what you 
deserve too, I suppose, which is to live 
in your own company till the end of your 
miserable existence. I won't deprive you 
of your reward more than I can help, I 
promise you! 

(Hancock goes out,) 



135 



THE WISDOM OF 
A STUDENT IN ARMS 



137 



IX 

THE WISDOM OF " A STUDENT IN 
ARMS " 

It is no good trying to fathom "things" 
to the bottom; they have not got one. 

Knowledge is always descriptive, and 
never fundamental. We can describe the 
appearance and conditions of a process; 
but not the way of it. 

Agnosticism is a fundamental fact. It 
is the starting-point of the wise man who 
has discovered that it needs eternity to 
study infinity. 

Agnosticism, however, is no excuse for 
indolence. Because we cannot know all, 
we need not therefore be totally ignorant. 

The true wisdom is that in which all 
knowledge is subordinate to practical aims, 

139 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



and blended Into a working philosophy 
of life. 

The true wisdom is that it is not what 
a man does, or has, or says, that matters; 
but what he is. 

This must be the aim of practical philo- 
sophy — to make a man be something. 

The world judges a man by his station, 
inherited or acquired. God judges by his 
character. To be our best we must share 
God's viewpoint. 

To the world death is always a tragedy; 
to the Christian it is never a tragedy unless 
a man has been a contemptible character. 

Religion is the widening of a man's 
horizon so as to include God. 

It is in the nature of a speculation, but 
its returns are immediate. 

True religion means betting one's life 
that there is a God. 

Its immediate fruits are courage, stabil- 
ity, calm, unselfishness, friendship, gener- 
osity, humility, and hope. 

140 



THE WISDOM OF "A STUDENT IN ARMS" 

Religion is the only possible basis of 
optimism. 

Optimism is the essential condition of 
progress. 

One is what one believes oneself to be. 
If one believes oneself to be an animal 
one becomes bestial; if one believes one- 
self spiritual one becomes Divine. 

Faith is an effective force whose meas- 
ure has never yet been taken. 

Man is the creature of heredity and 
environment. He can only rise superior 
to circumstances by bringing God into 
environment of which he is conscious. 

The recognition of God's presence upsets 
the balance of a man's environment, and 
means a new birth into a new life. 

The faculties which perceive God in- 
crease with use like any other perceptive 
faculties. 

Belief in God may be an illusion; but it 
is an illusion that pays. 

If belief in God is illusion, happy is 

141 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



he who is deluded! He gains this world 
and thinks he will gain the next. 

The disbeliever loses this world, and 
risks losing the next. 

To be the centre of one's universe is 
misery. To have one's universe centred 
in God is the peace that passeth under- 
standing. 

Greatness is founded on inward peace. 

Energy is only effective when it springs 
from deep calm. 

The pleasure of life lies in contrasts; 
the fear of contrasts is a chain that binds 
most men. 

In the hour of danger a man is proven. 
The boaster hides, and the egotist trem- 
bles. He whose care is for others forgets 
to be afraid. 

Men live for eating and drinking, passion 
and wealth. They die for honour. 

Blessed is he of whom it has been said 
that he so loved giving that he even gave 
his own life. 

142 



IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 



143 



X 

IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 
III 

Scene. -^ trench unpleasantly near the 
firing line. There has been an hours 
intense bombardment by the British^ 
with suitable retaliation by the Boches, 
The retaliation is just dying down. 

Characters.^ kLBEKr-^Round-eyed^ ro- 
tund, red-cheeked, yellow-haired, and 
deliberate; in civil life probably a dray- 
man, Jim — Small, lean, sallow, grey- 
eyed, with a kind of quiet restlessness; 
in civil life probably a mechanic with 
leanings towards Socialism, Pozzie — 
A thick-set, low-browed, impassive, silent 

10 145 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



country youth, with a face the colour 
of the soil. Jinks — An old soldier^ redy 
leany wrinkled, with very blue eyes. 
His face is rough-hewn, almost grotesque 
like a gargoyle. In his eyes there is a 
'perpetual glint of humour, and in the 
poise of his head a certain irrepressible 
jauntiness, 

Albert {whose eyes are more staring 
than ever, his cheeks pendulous and crim- 
son, his general air that of a partly deflated 
air-cushion) . Gawd's truth ! 

Jinks {gagging his head). Well, my old 
sprig o' mint, what's wrong wi' you? 

Albert. It ain't right. (Sententiously) 
It's agin natur'. Flesh an' blood weren't 
made for this sort o' think. 

Jim. It ain't flesh an' blood that can't 
stand it. It's Mind. Look at old Pozzie. 
'E's flesh an' blood, and don't turn an 
'air! For myself I'll go potty one o' 
these days. 

146 



IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

Jinks (slapping Pozzie on the back). 
You don't take no notice, do you, old 
lump o' duff? 

Pozzie. Oi woulden moind if I got 
moy rations; but a chap can't keep a 
good 'eart if 'e's got an empty stum- 
mick. 

Jim {sarcastically). You keep yer 'eart 
in yer stomach, don't yer? You ain't 
got no mind, you ain't. Jinks was born 
potty, an' the rest of us'll all go potty 
except you. It's you an' yer Ally Sloper's 
Cavalry what'll win the war, I don't think! 

Albert. What I wants ter know is 
'ow long the bleedin' war's a-goin' ter 
last. If it goes on much longer I'll be 
potty if I ain't a gone 'un. 

Jim. There's only one way of ending 
it as I knows on. 

Albert. What's that, matey? 

Jim. Put all the bleedin' politicians 
on both sides in the bleedin' trenches. 
Give 'em a week's bombardment, an' 

147 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



send 'em away for a week to make peace, 
with a promise of a fortnight's intense at 
the end of it if they've failed. They'd 
find a way, sure enough. 

Albert {admiringly). Ah, that they 
would an' all. If old ''Wait and See" 'ad 
been 'ere these last four days 'e wouldn't 
talk about fightin' to the last man! 

Jinks. Don't talk stoopid. 'Oo be- 
gan the bloomin' war? Don't yer know 
what you're fightin' for? D'you want 
ter leave the 'Uns in France an' Belgium 
an' Serbia an' all? It ain't fer us to make 
peace. It's fer the 'Uns. An' if you arc 
done in, you got to go under some day. I 
ain't sure as they ain't the lucky ones what's 
got it over and done with. And arter all, 
it's not us what's not proper. The Uns 
'ave 'ad two fer our one. 

Albert. They got dug-outs as deep as 
'ell, it don't touch 'em. 

Jinks {but without conviction). Don't 
talk silly. 

148 



IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

PozziE. Oi reckon we got to go through 
with it. But they didn^t ought to give 
a chap short rations. That's what takes 
the 'cart out of a chap. 



149 



LETTER TO AN ARMY 
CHAPLAIN 



151 



^ XI 
LETTER TO AN ARMt CHAPLAIN^ 

Jpril 17, 1916. 

Thank you very much for your letter 
of a week ago, which I should have tried 
to answer before if I had had time. I 
am afraid that your confidence in me as 
an oracle will be severely shaken when I 
confess that I was once on the eve of being 
ordained, and that in the end I funked it 
because it seemed such an awfully diffi- 
cult job, and I couldn't see my way to 
going through with it. 

However, I must try to answer your 

* This chapter is the actual text of a letter from " A Student 
in Arms," and like the most of the other chapters appeared 
originally in the Spectator. 

153 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



letter as best I can, and I hope that you 
will not mind my speaking plainly what 
I think, and will remember that I do so 
in no spirit of superiority, but very humbly, 
as one who has funked the great work 
that you have had the pluck to take up, 
and who has even failed in the little bit 
of work that he himself did try and do. 
This last means that I have no business 
to be an officer. It was the biggest mis- 
take in my life, for my position in the 
ranks did give me a hold on the fellows, 
the strength of which I have only realized 
since I left. 

Now then to the point. As I under- 
stand you, your difficulty is that you 
feel that you must devote yourself to 
strengthening a very few men who are 
already Churchmen, and to whom you 
can talk in the language of the Church 
of things which you know they want to 
hear about, or you must appeal to the 
crowd of those who are merely good fellows 

154 



LETTER TO AN ARMY CHAPLAIN 

and often sad scamps too, who must be 
caught with buns and cinemas and who 
are very difficult to get any farther. 

I fancy that you, Hke me, when you 
see a fine dashing young fellow, with a 
touch of honesty and recklessness and 
wonderful mystery of youth in his eyes, 
love him as a brother, and long to do some- 
thing to keep him clean, and to keep him 
from the sordid things to which you and 
I know well enough he will descend in the 
long run if one cannot put the love of clean, 
wholesome life into his heart. But how to 
get at him ? If you talk to him about his 
soul you disgust him, and you feel a sort 
of sneaking sympathy with him too. It 
does not seem the thing to make a chap 
self-conscious and a bit of a prig when he 
is not one to start with. On the other 
hand, if you just keep to buns and cinemas 
you never get any jfarther. Well, it is a 
big difficulty. The only experience that 
I have had which counts at all is experi- 

155 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



ence that I gained while trying to run a 
boys* club In South London, and you must 
not think me egotistical if I tell you what 
seems to me to have been the secret of any 
power that I seem to have had over fellows. 
At first I used to have a short service 
at the close of the club every evening, to 
which most of the boys used to stay. I 
also had a service on Sunday afternoon. 
Something of the same sort might perhaps 
be possible in the Y. M. C. A. tent if there is 
one where you are. When I was talking 
to them at these services I always used 
to try and make them feel that Christ 
was the fulfilment of all the best things 
that they admired, that He was their 
natural hero. I would tell them some 
story of heroism and meanness contrasted, 
of courage and cowardice, of noble for- 
giveness and vile cruelty, and so get them 
on the side of the angels. Then I would 
try and spring it upon them that Christ 
was the Lord of the heroes and the brave 

156 



LETTER TO AN ARMY CHAPLAIN 

men and the noble men, and that He was 
fighting against all that was mean and 
cruel and cowardly, and that it was up 
to them to take their stand by His side 
if they wanted to make the world a little 
better instead of a little worse, and I would 
try to show them how in little practical 
ways in their homes and at their work and 
in the club they could do a bit for Christ. 
Well, they listened pretty well, and I 
think that they agreed in a general sort of 
way, only they knew that I was a richish 
man in comparison with them, and that 
I didn't have their difficulties to contend 
with, and that all tended to undo the 
effect of what I had said. And then 
accident gave me a sort of clue to the 
way to get them to take one seriously. 
For some idiotic reason — I really couldn't 
say just what it was — I dressed up as a 
tramp one day, and spent a night in a 
casual ward. I didn't do it for any very 
worthy motive, and I didn't mean any 

157 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



one to know about it; but it got round, 
and I suddenly found that it had caught 
the imaginations of some of the fellows, 
and I realized that if one was to have 
any power over them one must do sym- 
bolic things to show them that one meant 
what one said about love being really 
better than money, and all that sort of 
thing. So in rather a half-hearted way I 
did try to do things which would show them 
that I was in earnest. I took a couple of 
rooms in a little cottage in a funny little 
bug-ridden court, instead of living at the 
mission-house. I went out to Australia 
steerage to see why emigration of London 
boys was not a success, and when war 
broke out I enlisted, although I had pre- 
viously held a commission. And all these 
little things, though on reasonable grounds 
often rather indefensible, undoubtedly had 
the effect of making my South London boys 
take me more seriously than they did at first. 
Well, I am quite sure that with Tommies, if 

158 



LETTER TO AN ARMY CHAPLAIN 

ever you get a chance of doing something 
in the way of sharing their privations and 
dangers when you aren't obliged to, or of 
showing in practical ways humility and un- 
selfishness, that will endear you to them, 
and give you weight with them more than 
anything else. In my time in the ranks 
I had that proved over and over again. 
If once I was able to do even a small kind- 
ness for a fellow which involved a bit of 
unnecessary trouble, he would never for- 
get it, and would repay me a thousand 
times over. I was a sergeant for about 
nine months in England, and had one or 
two chances. Then I reverted to the 
ranks, and for that the men could not do 
enough to show me kindness. (It was 
my not valuing rank and comparative 
comfort for its own sake that appealed to 
them.) Continually I have reaped a most 
gigantic reward of goodwill for actions 
which cost very little, and which were not 
always done from the motives imputed. 

159 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



I am not swanking — at least, I don't 
mean to — but that Is just my experience, 
that with Tommy it is actions, and spe- 
cially actions that imply and symbolize 
humility, courage, unselfishness, etc., that 
count ten thousand times more than the 
best sermons in the world. I am afraid 
that all this is not much good because 
you are an officer, and your course of 
action is very clearly marked out for you 
by authority. But I do say that if ever 
you have a chance of showing that you 
are willing to share the often hard and 
sometimes humiliating lot of the men it 
is that which above all things will give 
you power with them; just as it Is the 
Cross of Christ, and the spitting and the 
mocking and the scourging, and the de- 
gradation of His exposure in dying, that 
gives Him His power far more than even 
the Sermon on the Mount. After all, it 
Is always what costs most that is best 
worth having, and if you only see Tommy 

160 



LETTER TO AN AEMY CHAPLAIN 

In his easiest moments, when he is at the 
Y. M. C. A. or the club, you see him at the 
time when he is least impressionable in a 
permanent manner. 

Well, I must apologize for writing such 
an egotistical and intimate sort of letter 
on so slight a provocation. But this that 
I have said is all that my experience has 
taught me about influencing the Tommy. 
No doubt there are other ways ; but I have 
not been able to strike them. 
Yours very truly, 

Donald Hankey, 2nd Lieut. 

P. S. — Of course in becoming a Second 
Lieutenant I have dished my own in- 
fluence most effectually. It has often 
appeared to me that among ordinary 
working men humility was considered the 
Christian virtue par excellence. Humility 
combined with love is so rare, I suppose, 
and that is why it is marvelled at. 

II 161 



"DON'T WORRY" 



16S 



XII 

"DON'T WORRY" 

-This is at present the soldier's favourite 
chorus at the front — 

" What*s the use of worrying? 
It never was worth while! 
Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag 
. And Smile, Smile, Smile!" 

Not a bad chorus, either, for the trenches! 
You can't stop a shell from bursting in 
your trench, even if Mr. Rawson can! 
You can't stop the rain, or prevent a 
light from going up just as you are half- 
way over the parapet ... so what on 
earth is the use of worrying? If you can't 
alter things, you must accept them, and 
make the best of them. 

165 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



Yet some men do worry, and by so 
doing effectually destroy their peace of 
mind without doing any one any good. 
What is worse, it is often the religious 
man who worries. I have even heard 
those whose care was for the soldier's 
soul, deplore the fact that he did not 
worry! I have heard it said that the 
soldier is so careless, realizes his position 
so little, is so hard to touch! And, on 
the other hand, I have heard the soldier 
say that he did not want religion, because 
it would make him worry. Strange, isn't 
it, if Christianity means worry and anxiety, 
and if it is only the heathen who is cheer- 
ful and free from care.^ Yet the feeling 
that this is so undoubtedly exists, and 
it must have some foundation. Perhaps 
It is one of the subjects which ought to 
engage the attention of Churchmen in 
these days of "repentance and hope." 

Of course, worrying is about as un- 
christian as anything can be. " pi-^ fxepijxvats 

166 



"DONT WOURY" 



rrj ipvxff vMGov'' — "Don't worry about your 
life"' — is the Master's express command. 
In fact, the call of Christ is a call to 
something very Hke the cheerfulness of the 
soldier in the trenches. It is a call to a 
life of external turmoil and internal peace. 
"I came not to bring peace, but a sword"; 
"take up your cross and follow Me"; "ye 
shall be hated"; "he that would save 
his life shall lose it. " It is a call to take 
risks, to risk poverty, unpopularity, humilia- 
tion, death. It is a call to follow the 
way of the Cross. But the way of the 
Cross is also the way of peace, the peace 
of God that passeth understanding. It 
is a way of freedom from all cares, and 
anxieties, and fears; but not a way of 
escape from them. 

Yet worrying is often a feature of the 
actual Churchman. The actual Church- 
man is often a man whose conscience is 
an incubus. He can do nothing without 
weighing motives and calculating results. 



167 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



It makes him introspective to an extent 
that is positively morbid. He is continu- 
ally probing himself to discover whether 
his motives are really pure and disinterested, 
continually trying to decide whether he is 
"worthy" or "fit" to undertake this or that 
responsibility, or to face this or that eventu- 
ality. He is full of suspicion of himself, of 
self-distrust. In the trenches he is always 
wondering whether he is fit to die, whether 
he will acquit himself worthily in a crisis, 
whether he has done anything that he 
ought not to have done, or left undone 
anything that he ought to have done. 
Especially if he is an officer, his responsi- 
bility weighs on him terribly, and I have 
known more than one good fellow and 
conscientious Churchman worry himself 
into thinking that he was unfit for his 
responsibilities as an officer, and ask to 
be relieved of them. 

There must be something wrong about 
the Christianity of such men. Their 

168 



**DONT WORRY 



over-conscientiousness seems to create a 
wholly wrong sense of proportion, an ex- 
aggerated sense of the significance of their 
own actions and characters which is as far 
removed as can be from the childlike hu- 
mility which Christ taught. The truth 
seems to be that we lay far too much stress 
on conscience, self-examination, and per- 
sonal salvation, and that we trust the 
Holy Spirit far too little. 

If we look to the teaching of Christ, we 
do not find any recommendation to me- 
ticulous self-analysis, but rather we are 
taught a kind of spiritual recklessness, 
an unquestioning confidence in what seem 
to be right impulses, and that quite regard- 
less of results. We are not told to be 
careful to spend each penny to the best 
advantage ; but we are told that if our money 
is preventing us from entering the Kingdom, 
we had better give it all away. We are not 
told to set a high value on our lives, and 
to spend them with care for the good of the 

169 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



Kingdom. On the contrary, we are told 
to risk our lives recklessly if we would pre- 
serve them. A sense of anxious responsibil- 
ity is discouraged. If our limbs cause us to 
offend, we are advised to cut them off. 

The whole teaching of the Gospels is 
that we have got to find freedom and 
peace in trusting ourselves implicitly to 
the care of God. We have got to follow 
what we think right quite recklessly, and 
leave the issue to God; and in judging 
between right and wrong we are only 
given two rules for our guidance. Every- 
thing which shows love for God and love 
for man is right, and everything which 
shows personal ambition and anxiety is 
wrong. 

What all this means as far as the trenches 
are concerned is extraordinarily clear. The 
Christian is advised not to be too pushing or 
ambitious. He is advised to "take the 
lowest room. " But if he is told to move up 
higher, he has got to go. If he is given 

170 



DON'T WORRY 



responsibility, there is no question of refus- 
ing it. He has got to do his best and leave 
the issue to God. If he does well, he will be 
given more responsibility. But there is no 
need to worry. The same formula holds 
good for the new sphere. Let him do his 
best and leave the issue to God. If he does 
badly, well, if he did his best, that means 
that he was not fit for the job, and he 
must be perfectly willing to take a hum- 
bler job, and do his best at that. 

As for personal danger, he must not 
think of it. If he is killed, that is a sign 
that he is no longer indispensable. Per- 
haps he is wanted elsewhere. The enemy 
can only kill the body, and the body is 
not the important thing about him. Every 
man who goes to war must, if he is to be 
happy, give his body, a living sacrifice, to 
God and his country. It is no longer his. 
He need not worry about it. The peace of 
God which passeth all understanding sim- 
ply comes from not worrying about results 

171 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



because they are God's business and not 
ours, and in trusting implicitly all impulses 
that make for love of God and man. Few 
of us perhaps will ever attain to a full 
measure of such faith ; but at least we can 
make sure that our "Christianity'' brings 
us nearer to it. 



172 



IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 



178 



XIII 

IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

IV 

AU COIFFEUR 

Scene. A barber's shop in a small French 
town about thirty miles from the front, 
A Subaltern and a stout Bour- 
geois are waiting their turn. 

Bourgeois. Is it that it is the mud of 
the trenches on the boots of Monsieur? 

Subaltern. Ah! but no, Monsieur, for 
then it would reach to my waist ! 

Bourgeois. Nevertheless, Monsieur is 
but recently come from the trenches, is 
it not so? 

175 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



Subaltern. Yes, I am arrived from the 
trenches yesterday. 

Bourgeois. Then Monsieur has as- 
sisted at the great attack! 

Subaltern. Oh, yes, I helped a very 
little bit. 

Bourgeois. There have; been immense 
losses, is it not so? 

Subaltern {vaguely). There are always 
great losses when one attacks. 

Bourgeois. Ah! but much greater 
than one expected — I have seen, I, the 
wounded coming down the river. 

Subaltern. I — I have always expected 
great losses. 

Bourgeois. 'Tis true. There are al- 
ways great losses when one attacks. But 
all goes well, Monsieur, is it not so.? 

Subaltern. It is difficult to estimate 
the success of an attack until after several 
weeks. But I think that all goes well. 

Bourgeois. But yes, the French, they 
have had a great success, and also the 

176 



IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

English. The English are wonderful. 
Their equipment! It is that which as- 
tonishes me. Everything is complete. 
They say that the English have saved 
France; but the French also, they have 
saved England, is it not so. Monsieur ? 

Subaltern. But we are saving each 
other ! 

Bourgeois. Good! We are saving 
each other! Very good! But after the 
war. Monsieur, England will fight against 
France, hein? 

Subaltern. Never! 

Bourgeois. Never? 

Subaltern. Never in life! 

Bourgeois. You think so? 

Subaltern. We do not love war. We 
do not seek war. It is only when a nation 
is so execrable that one is compelled to 
fight, as have been the Germans, that we 
make war. 

Bourgeois. You do not love war, eh? 
Before the war you had a very small Army, 

la 177 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



about three hundred thousand, Is It not so ? 
And now you have about three million. 
You do not love war, you others. 

Subaltern. The Germans thought that 
they loved war, but I do not believe that 
they will love It very much longer! 

Bourgeois. No! The war will give 
them the stomach-ache. They will love 
it no longer! 

Coiffeur. But these English, whom 
did they fight before? The Boers, was 
It not? 

Subaltern. Yes, but a great many 
English think now that It was a hetise. 
There was also great provocation. And 
nevertheless, who knows If there was not 
In that affair also a German plot? 

Bourgeois. It Is very likely. Then 
Monsieur thinks that we are true friends, 
the English and the French? 

Subaltern. But yes, Monsieur, be- 
cause we love, both of us, liberty and 
peace. 

178 



A PASSING IN JUNE, 1915 



179 



XIV 

A PASSING IN JUNE, 1915 

PROLOGUE 

Scene. The parlour of an Auherge, 

Persons. A stout motherly Madame, a 
wrinkled fatherly Monsieur, and a 
plain hut pleasant Ma'mselle. Some 
English soldiers drinking, Cecil is 
talking in French to Monsieur, and 
they are all very friendly, 

Madame. Alors, vous n'avez pas en- 
core ete aux tranchees? 

Cecil. Mais non, Madame, peut-etre 
ce solr. 

(Monsieur and Madame exchange Ranees, 
Cecil rises to go.) 

181 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



Cecil. A Jeudi, Monsieur, Madame, 
Ma'mselle. 

Monsieur, Madame, and Ma'mselle 
(in chorus). A Jeudi, Monsieur. 

Madame (earnestly). Bon courage. Mon- 
sieur! 

(Curtain) 
ACT I. DAWN 

Cecil is discovered lying behind a wall of 
sandbags. On one side are the sand- 
bags^ and on the other an idyllic spring 
scene, with flowers and orchards seen 
in the half-light of a spring morning. 
The dawn breaks gently, and soon bullets 
begin to ping through the air, flattening 
themselves against the sandbags, or pass- 
ing over Cecil's head. He wakes and 
yawns, and then composes himself with 
his eyes open. 

Enter Allegorical personages: Father Sun, 

182 



A PASSING IN JUNE, 1915 



Mother Earth, and a chorus of 
Grasses, Poppies, Cornflowers, 
Ragged Robins, Daisies, Beetles, 
Bees, Flies, and insects of all kinds. 

Father Sun. 
Wake, children, rub your eyes. 
Up and dance and sing and play. 
Not a cloud is in the skies; 
This is going to be my day. 
See the tiny dew-drop glisten 
In my glancing golden ray; 
See the shadows dancing, listen 
To the lark so blithe and gay. 
Up, children, dance and play, 
This is my own festal day. 
Flowers, Beetles, etc. 

Dance and sing 

In a ring. 
Naughty clouds are chased away; 

Oh what fun, 

Father Sun 
Is going to shine the whole long day. 

183 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



Mother Earth. That's right, child- 
ren. This is the day to grow in; but 
don't forget to come home to dinner; 
I've got such a nice dinner for you. 

{The children dance away delightedly, while 
Cecil watches them, fascinated,) 

Mother Earth. What's this absurd 
young man doing, sitting behind that 
ugly wall? Why don't he sit under a 
tree if he must sit ? 

Father Sun. Oh, he's a lunatic! Must 
be. 

(Random Bullet jumps over the sandbags 
into the dug-out, and jibbers impo- 
tently at Cecil, who glances up at him 
with a look of disgust,) ^ 

Random Bullet. Ping! Ping. It's 
me he's afraid of. He daren't stir a yard 
from this wall, or I'd tear his brains out. 
Ping ! Ping ! 

184 



A PASSING IN JUNE, 1915 



Mother Earth. Who are you, Monster ? 

Random Bullet. I'm Random Bullet. 
I am a monster, I am ! Ping ! 

Mother Earth. Who sent you, any- 
way ? 

Random Bullet. Why, the Idiots be- 
hind the other wall, over there! Some- 
times I jiimp at them, and sometimes I 
jump over here. I don't care which way 
it is; but I like tearing their brains out, 
I do. I don't care which lot it is. 

Mother Earth. What madness! 

Father Sun {indignantly). On my day 
too! 

Random Bullet. Mad! I should think 
they were! Never mind, they give me 
some fun! Ping! So long, I'm off, going 
to jump at the other fellows, back in a sec- 
ond if you like to wait. 

(Random Bullet jumps out of sight, and 
Mother Earth and Father Sun 

move disgustedly away?) 

185 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



Cecil {getting up). Mad! By God, we 
are mad! Curse the war! Curse the 
fools who started it! Why did I ever 
come out here? What a way to spend 
a morning in June! 

{Curtain?) 

ACT II. MIDDAY 

Scene. The same. Cecil as before, hut 
sweltering in the sun. Enter the Spirit 
OF Thirst. 

Thirst. Oh for a drink! Water, any- 
thing! I could drink a bath full. What 
a place to spend a June day in! When 
one thinks of all the drinks one might 
be having, it is really infuriating. Gad! 
The very thought of 'em makes me feel 
quite poetic! Think of the great barrels 
of still cider in cool Devonshire cellars! 
Think of the sour refreshing wine we used 

186 



A PASSING IN JUNE, 1915 



to get in Italy! And the iced cocktails 
of Colombo! And Pimm's No. i in the 
City. Anywhere but here it's a pleasure 
to be a Thirst; but here! Good Lord, 
it will send me off my head. How would 
a bath go now, old chap? By God, don't 
you wish you were back in your canoe, 
drawn up among the rushes near I slip, 
and you just going to plunge into the cool 
waters of the Char? Or think of that day 
you bathed in the deep still pool at the foot 
of the Tamarin Falls, with the water crash- 
ing down above you, into the deep shady 
chasm. Even a dip in the sea at Mount 
Lavinia wouldn't be bad now, — or, better 
still, a dive into Como from a rowboat ; you 
remember that hot summer we went to 
Como? I'll tell you another thing that 
wouldn't go down badly either. Do you 
remember a great bowl of strawberries and 
cream with a huge ice in it, that you had the 
day before you left school, after that hot 
bike ride to Leamington ? Not bad, was it ? 

187 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



Cecil {fiercely). Shut up, you beast! 
Oh, curse this idiotic war! Why are we 
such fools? 

{Curtain^ 

ACT III. LATE AFTERNOON 

Scene. As before, Cecil is discovered 
reading a letter from home. 

Cecil {to himself). Tom dead. Good 
Lord! What times we have had together! 
Where are all the good fellows I used to 
know? Half of them dead, and the rest 
condemned to die! No more yachting on 
the broads! No more convivial evenings 
at the Troc. ! No more long nights spinning 
yarns in Tom's old rooms in the Temple ! 
Curse this blasted war that robs one of 
everything worth having, that dulls every 
sense of decency and kills all feeling for 
beauty, destroys the joy of life, and muti- 
lates one's dearest friends. Curse it! 

188 



A PASSING IN JUNE, 1915 



{A sound as of an express train is heard, 
followed by the roar of an explosion, 
while a dense cloud of smoke and dust 
rises immediately in view of the trench.) 

Portentous Voice. Prepare to face 
eternity ! 

Cecil {clenching his fists). Beast, loath- 
some beast! Don't think I am afraid of 
you. 

{The sounds are repeated as a second shell 
drops, rather nearer, A Shadow ap- 
pears round the dug-out, and hesitates?) 

Cecil {to the Shadow), Who is that? 
Is that the Shadow of Fear? 

A Thin, Quavering Voice. Yes, shall 
I come in? 

Cecil {furiously). Out of my sight, vile, 
cringing wretch! Not even your shadow 
will I tolerate in my presence! 

{A third shell bursts nearer still.) 

189 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



Portentous Voice {thunderously). Set 
not your affections on things below. 

(Cecil pauses in a listening attitude), 

Cecil {more quietly, and with a new look 
in his eyes). I think I have forgotten some- 
thing, — something rather important. 

{Enter the twin Spirits of Honour and 
Duty, Spirits of a very noble and 
courtly mien.) 

Cecil {simply and humbly). Gentlemen, 
to my sorrow and loss I had forgotten 
you. You are doubly welcome. 

The Spirit of Duty. Young sir, we 
thank you. After all, it is but right 
that in this hour of danger and dismay 
we should be with you. 

The Spirit of Honour. I am so old 
a friend of you and yours, Cecil, that 
you may surely trust me. I was your 
father's friend. Side by side we stood in 
every crisis of his varied life. Together 

190 



A PASSING IN JUNE, 1915 



faced the Dervish rush at Abu Klea, and 
afterwards in India took our part in many 
a desperate unnamed frontier tussle. I 
helped him woo your mother, spoke for 
him when he put up for Parliament, ad- 
vised him when he visited the city. In 
fact, I was his companion all through 
life, and I stood beside his bed at death. 

The Spirit of Duty. I too may claim 
to have been as much your father's friend 
as was my brother. Indeed, where one 
is, the other is never far away. We do 
agree most wonderfully, and since our 
birth, no quarrel has ever disturbed the 
harmony of our ways. 

Cecil. Gentlemen, you have recalled 
me to myself. I had forgotten that I 
was no more a child. I wanted to dance 
in the sun with the flowers, and sing with 
the birds, to swim in the pool with yon- 
der newt, and lie down to dry in the long 
meadow grass among the poppies. Because 
I might not do this and other things as fond 

191 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



and foolish, I was petulant and peevish, like 
a spoilt child. I look to you, gentlemen, to 
help me to be a man, and play a man's part 
in the world. 

Honour. We will remain at hand, call 
us when you need us, we shall not fail you. 

(The bombardment increases in intensity. 
Shrapnel bursts overhead. Shells with 
increasing rapidity and accuracy ex- 
plode both short and over the trench. 
The hail of bullets is continuous. An 
N, C, 0, rushes by shouting ''Stand 
to''; men rush from the dug-outs and 
seize their rifles; Cecil, like the others, 
grasps his rifle and sees that it is fully 
loaded,) 

{Curtain,) 

ACT IV. SUNSET 

Scene. The same, but the wall of sand- 

192 



A PASSING IN JUNE, 1915 



bags is broken in many places. The 
dead lie half -buried beneath them, 
Cecil lies^ badly wounded, against a 
gap in the wall, his rifle by his side. 
Honour and Duty kneel beside him 
tenderly. The last rays of the sun 
light up his painful smile. Thirst 
stands gloomily over him, and the wild 
flowers are peeping at him with sleepy 
eyes through the gap, while Mother 
Earth calls to them to go to bed. 
Father Sun leans sadly over the broken 
parapet, 

Cecil {slowly and with difficulty). Hon- 
our, Duty, I thank you. You did not 
fail me. 

Honour. You played the man, Cecil, 
as your father did before you. 

Duty. Your example it was that 
steadied your comrades, and kept craven 
fear at a distance. You saved the 
trench. 

13 193 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



Honour. This Is the beauty of man- 
hood, to die for a good cause. There 
is no fairer thing in all God's world. 

Cecil. I thank you. Good-night, Sun; 
good-night, Mother Earth. Think kindly 
of me. I don't think I was mad after all. 

Sun. Good-night, brave lad. {To 
Mother Earth) I can hardly bear to 
look on so sad a sight. 

Cecil. Good-night, Ragged Robins; 
good-night. Poppies. You have played 
your game, and I mine. Only they are 
different because we are different. 

Chorus of Flowers. Good-night, dear 
Cecil. We are so very sorry that you are 
hurt. 

{Enter the Master, flowers shyly following 
him. Honour and Duty raise Cecil 
gently to a standing position,) 

The Master {extending his arms with a 
loving smile). "Well done, good and faith- 

194 



A PASSING IN JUNE, 1915 



ful servant. Enter thou into the joy of 
thy Lord." 

(Cecil, with a look of wonder and joyy is 
borne forward,) 

{Curtain.) 



105 



MY HOME AND SCHOOL 
A Fragment of Autobiography 



197 



XV 

MY HOME AND SCHOOL* 
I 

MY HOME 

What is one to say of home? It is diffi- 
cult to know. I find that biographers 
are particular about the date of birth, the 
exact address of the babe, the social posi- 
tion and ancestry of the parent. I suppose 
that it is all that they can learn. But as 
an autobiographer I want to do something 
better; to give a picture of the home where, 
as I can now see, ideals, tastes, prejudices 
and habits were formed which have per- 

*"A Student" left a great deal of manuscript, among 
which this fragment of autobiography is not the least 
interesting, 

109 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



sisted through all the internal revolutions 
that have since upheaved my being. 

I try to form the picture in my mind, 
and a crowd of detail rushes in which 
completely destroys its simplicity and 
harmony. How hard it is to judge, even 
at this distance, what are the salient fea- 
tures. I must try, but I know that from 
the point of view of psychological develop- 
ment I may easily miss out the very factors 
which were really most important. 

I remember a big house, in a row of 
other big houses, in a side street leading 
from the East Cliff at Brighton right up 
to the edge of the bare rolling downs. It 
was exactly like almost every other house 
in that part of Brighton — stucco fronted, 
with four stories and a basement, three 
windows in front on each of the upper 
stories, and two windows and a door on 
the ground floor and basement. At the 
back was a small garden, with flower beds 
surrounding a square of gravel, and a 

200 



MY HOME 



tricycle house in one corner. There was 
a back door in this garden, which gave 
on to a street of cottages. This back 
door was a point of strategic importance. 

But I need not describe the house in de- 
tail. It was exactly Hke thousands of other 
houses built in the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century. High, respectable, ugly 
and rather inconvenient, with many stairs, 
two or three big rooms, a lot of small ones 
and no bathroom. It was essentially a 
family house, intended for people of moder- 
ate means and large families. Nowadays 
they build houses which are prettier, and 
have bathrooms ; but they are not meant for 
large families. 

We were a large family, and a fairly 
noisy one. Moreover, we were singularly 
self-sufficing. We hadn't many friends, 
we didn't entertain much, we had dinner 
in the middle of the day, and supper in the 
evening. 

There was my father who was a recluse, 

201 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



my mother who was essentially our mother, 
the two girls and four boys. I was an 
afterthought, being seven years younger 
than my next brother, who for seven years 
had been called B. (for baby), and couldn't 
escape from it even after my appearance. 

In addition to these, B. and I both had 
Inseparable friends, who lived within a 
stone's throw. Ronnie was my alter ego 
till I was fourteen: so much so that I had 
no other friend. Even now, though our 
ways have kept us apart, and our Interests 
and opinions are fundamentally different, 
we can sit In each other's rooms with per- 
fect content. We know too much of each 
other for it to be possible to pretend to be 
what we are not. We sit and are our- 
selves, naked and unashamed so to speak, 
and it Is very restful. 

Pictures float before my mind. Let me 
select a few. I see a rather fat, stolid 
little boy in a big airy nursery at the top 
of the house, sitting in the middle of the 

£02 



MY HOME 



floor playing with bricks. Outside it is 
gusty and wet, and the small boy hopes 
that he will be allowed to stay in all the 
afternoon, and play with bricks. But that 
is not to be. A small thin man, with 
gentle grey eyes, short curly beard, an old 
black greatcoat and a black square felt 
hat, comes in. The child must have some 
air. The child is resentful, but resigned, 
is wrapped up well, put in his pram and 
wheeled up and down the Madeira Road. 

"Pa'' didn't appear very much except 
on some such errand; but "Ma" was In 
and out all the time. "Ma" was every- 
thing, the only woman who has ever had 
my whole love, my whole trust and has 
made my heart ache with the desire to 
show my love. 

A later picture. The boy Is bigger, 
and not so fat. He no longer has a nurse. 
He has vacated the nursery, which Is now 
tenanted by his big sisters. He has a little 
room all his own: a very small room, 

203 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



looking west. The south-west gales beat 
upon the window in the winter, and not so 
far away is the roar of the sea. It is good 
to curl up in a nice warm little bed, and 
listen to the howling of the wind and the 
waves. 

In the morning come lessons from his 
eldest sister G. The schoolroom has rings 
and a trapeze, a bookshelf full of boys' 
books, and cupboards full of stone bricks, 
cannon and soldiers. The boy's mind Is 
set on bricks and soldiers. Lessons and 
walks with "Ma" and his sisters or Ronnie 
and his nurse down the town are a nuisance. 
They interfere with the building of cathe- 
drals and the settling of the destinies of 
nations by the arbitrament of war. 

It was a stolid, placid boy, intensely 
wrapt up in his cathedrals and his generals, 
intensely devoted to *^Ma," and regard- 
ing all else as rather a nuisance. Ronnie 
he liked. He liked going to tea with 
him, and going walks with him and his 



MY HOME 



nurse ; but they didn't have much in com- 
mon except cricket. Ronnie had big sol- 
diers which could not be knocked down 
by cannon balls, and which couldn't make 
history because they were few in number, 
and nearly all English. Mine were of 
every European power, and many Asiatic 
ones. They were diminutive and numerous, 
could take shelter in a forest of pine cones 
and were admirably suited to be mown 
down at the cannon's mouth. The King 
of England was a person with a fine figure. 
He had one leg and one arm, and the plume 
of his dragoon's helmet was shorn off; 
but his slight, erect figure still looked noble 
on a stately white palfrey. The French 
armies were usually commanded by Mar- 
shal Petit, a gay fellow with his full com- 
plement of limbs, who sat a horse well. 
He had a younger brother almost equally dis- 
tinguished. I have no recollection of a King 
of France. He must have been a poor fel- 
low. The Sultan of Turkey, the Khedive, 

205 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



and Li Hung Chang still live in my memory 
as persons of distinction; but I have no 
personal recollection of the Tsar, or the 
Emperors of Germany or Austria, or of 
the King of Italy, though I know they 
existed. 

Into this placid existence turmoil would 
enter three times a year. The elder broth- 
ers, Hugh, Tommy and B., would come 
home for the holidays from Sandhurst and 
Rugby, and R. would appear, and become 
almost one of the family. Then would occur 
troublous times, with a few advantages and 
many disadvantages. 

"Tommy" was a curiously solitary youth 
as I remember him, who played the 'cello 
with great perseverance and considerable 
success. At soldiers he was something of 
a genius, though his games were of an in- 
tricacy which failed to commend itself to 
me altogether. In his great soldier days 
he not only made history, but wrote it — a 
height to which I never attained. 

206 



MY HOME 



In the holidays, cricket in the back 
garden became a great feature, and Tommy 
was a demon bowler. I fancy, too, that 
the very elaborate but highly satisfactory 
form of the game must have originated 
with him. In the back garden we not 
merely played cricket, but made history — 
cricket history. Two county sides were 
written out, and we batted alternately 
for the various cricketers, doing our best 
to imitate their styles. We bowled also 
in a rough imitation of the styles of the 
county bowlers whom we represented. This 
arrangement secured us against personal 
rivalry, kept up a tremendous interest in 
first-class cricket and enabled matches to 
continue, if necessary, for weeks at a time. 
It encouraged, too, a fair, impersonal and 
unprejudiced view of outside events. 

In cricket, war and music we undoubt- 
edly benefited by the holidays, especially 
in the summer, when we used to go to 
the country, often occupying a school-house 

207 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



with gym, cricket nets and a fair-sized 
garden. Ecclesiastical architecture suf- 
fered, however. . . . 

Hugh was a great and glorious person, 
a towering beneficent despot when he did 
appear. ... As for me I adored him 
with whole-hearted hero-worship. He was 
the "protector of the poor," who kept the 
rest of us in order. He was a magnificent 
person who revolutionized the art of war 
by the introduction of explosives. He was 
a tremendous walker, and first taught me 
to love great tramps over the downs, to 
sniff appreciatively the glorious air and 
to love their bare, storm-swept outlines. 
Hugh stood for all that Is wholesome, 
strenuous, out of doors in my life. With- 
out him I should have been a mere 
sedentary. Among other things he was 
an enthusiastic boxer and gymnast. For 
these pursuits I sturdily feigned enthu- 
siasm and suppressed timidity. 

A few more pictures. First, Sunday 

208 



MY HOME 



morning. Gertrude goes off to Sunday 
School. She likes teaching and bossing. 
Hilda and Hugh, who are greater pals than 
brother and sister can often be, go off to 
St. James', where there will be good music 
and an interesting sermon. Tommy goes 
to St. Mark's, a good Protestant place, or 
to the beach, where curious and recondite 
doctrines are weekly disputed. B. goes to 
St. George's, protesting. There is plenty 
of room for his hat, there is a congenially 
aggressive spirit against Rome and it 
slightly irritates Ma. Pa is not up yet. 
Ma and I go to All Souls', because it is the 
nearest poor church, and Ma finds it 
easier to worship where there are no pew 
rents, and the seats are uncushioned, and 
there are few rich people. I am ever 
loyal to Ma. 

I often wonder whether the reason why 
my family are all Churchgoers now is not 
that at that time we could choose our 
church. 

14 209 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



The next picture is Sunday night. "Pa" 
and I, and perhaps some of the other boys, 
set out for St. Paul's, at the other end of 
the town. Then, after the service, follows 
an immense walk all through the slums of 
the town. We talk of Australia, where Pa 
once had a sheep run; of theology, of the 
past and the future. This weekly walk is 
something of a privilege, and rather solemn. 
It makes me feel older. 

It is spring. I am at Rugby, and in 
the "San'' with ophthalmia. The South 
African war is raging. Hugh is there. 
I am told that Hugh is dead. He has 
been shot in a glorious but futile charge 
at Paardeberg. I can't realize it. I am 
an object of interest, of envy almost, 
to the whole school. The flag is half- 
mast because my brother is dead. Every 
one is kind, touched. I put on an air as of 
a martyr. 

I get a heartbroken letter from my 
mother. Will I come home? Or hadn't 

210 



MY HOME 



I better go to Uncle Jack's? If I go 
home we shall make each other worse. 
It is better for me than for Maurice, who 
is with the fleet In the Mediterranean 
with no one to comfort him. 

Ma has had a great shock. She feels It 
desperately. She thinks all the others feel 
it as much. Except Hilda, we don't. There 
is a huge piece taken out of Ma's life 
and Hilda's life, because they were so un- 
selfishly devoted to Hugh. Pa, also, has 
lost much, but he is a philosopher. 

I go to Uncle Jack's and shoot rabbits. 
The holidays come and go. Tommy is at 
Oxford; I am at Rugby. Pa is immersed 
in theological speculation about the next 
world; B. is in the Mediterranean. Ma 
sends Gertrude and Hilda away for a long 
change. They go, and come back. Some- 
thing about Ma frightens them. She and 
Pa come near Rugby and stay with Uncle 
Jack. The holidays come. I learn that for 
the first time for about twenty years Ma 

211 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



is to go away without Pa. I am to meet 
her at Hereford, and we are to go to Wales. 
Ma forgets things. She is more loving than 
ever, but her memory is going. We go to com- 
munion together in the little village church. 

A few weeks later. We are back in 
Brighton. An Australian uncle and family 
are staying with us. Ma is ill in bed. I 
get up at 6 A.M., tramp over the downs 
and in a place I wot of, some five miles 
away, I gather heather for Ma. I run. I 
get back by 8.30. I find my uncle and 
cousins getting into a cab. Some one says, 
"How lovely! Are these for me?" I grip 
them in despair. They are for Ma. "Quite 
right, " says some one. A day or two later 
my heather was placed, still blooming, on 
Ma's grave. 

I was sixteen then. Six years later I 
return home from abroad. Within a few 
weeks of my return I am sitting in Pa's 
room in agony, listening to him fight 
for breath. The fight at last weakens. I 



212 



MY HOME 



hear him whisper, "Help ! help !" I set my 
teeth. The others come in. There is silence. 
All is over. I am given my father's ring. 
It is my most treasured possession. 

Henceforth all I have left of home is 
Hilda, for she alone is unmarried. Ever 
since my mother's death she has been my 
confidante. As far as was possible she 
has taken Ma's place in my life, and I 
have taken Hugh's place in hers. We 
are substitutes. For that reason as we 
get older we get to know each other better, 
and to know better how much we can 
give to each other. There is more criti- 
cism between us than there would have 
been between Ma and me, and Hilda and 
Hugh. But it has its advantages. We live 
apart, but we correspond weekly, and 
holiday together. It is all that is left 
of home, and it is infinitely precious. 

Now that I have written these pages I 
can see as I have never seen before how 
much the child was father of the man. 

213 



A. STUDENT IN AHMS 



Since those home days I have had more 
variety of experience perhaps than falls 
to the lot of most men, and I would almost 
say more varied and more epoch-making 
friendships. Yet in these pages that I 
have written I seem to see all the essential 
and salient features of my character already 
mirrored and formed. 

I am still by nature lethargic and placid. 
I could still occupy myself contentedly 
with bricks and soldiers, art and history, 
and trouble no one. But there is still 
that other element, instilled by Hugh — a 
love of the open air, of strugglewith the 
elements, in lonely desert places. 

I have never lost the craving for true 
religion, which induced my mother to go to 
a poor church to worship, and to visit 
the drunken and helpless in their slums. 
I have never lost the desire for her single- 
ness of mind, and simple loyalty to Christ 
and His Church. At the same time I have 
never lost my father's inquiring spirit, 

214 



MY HOME 



broad view, love of doctrine tempered by 
reason and founded on history and tested by 
human experience. When these two be- 
loved ones passed from this world I learnt 
the meaning of the text, "Where your trea- 
sure is, there will your heart be also. '' My 
heart has never been wholly in this world. 
So, too, I have always been a man of few 
friends. Ronnie has had many succes- 
sors; but seldom more than one at a time. 
I have never cared much for society. 
My father and mother neither of them 
attached much importance to conven- 
tions, or to the fictitious values which 
society puts on clothes or money or posi- 
tion. I have always looked rather for 
some one to admire, some one whose ideals 
and personality were congenial, whatever 
their position or occupation. I have also, 
on the whole, always preferred comfort 
to show, simple to elaborate living. This 
I trace to the simple comfort and natural- 
ness of my old home. 

215 



II 



SCHOOL 



I WENT to a day school kept by Ronnie's 
father when I was nine. At least, It was 
a day school for me; but nearly all the 
boys were boarders. I worked fairly hard, 
and got prizes. I was fairly good at 
cricket, and not much good at football. 
I had only one friend — Ronnie — and 
about two enemies, both of whom were 
day boys, and whom I should have liked 
to have fought If I had dared. My mem- 
ories of the school are few. I best re- 
member leaving home, and going back, 
and also playing cricket. Ronnie's father 
lives as a just and straightforward gentle- 
man, who never caned a boy except for 
what was mean or dirty, and whom we all 

216 



SCHOOL 

loved and respected. But then I have 
known and loved him and his wife all 
my life. If our house was a second home 
to Ronnie, theirs has always been a second 
home to me. 

There was one master whom I liked, and 
who perhaps did something to develop my 
character. He was fond of poetry and 
history, and from him I learnt — an easy 
lesson for me — to love history; but what is 
more, he first gave me a glimmering idea, 
which was to develop long after, that the 
classics are literature, and not torture. 

I left there to go to Rugby. 

Never did a boy enter Rugby with 
better chances. The memory of my three 
brothers still lived in the house. They 
had all achieved distinction in games, 
and been leading prefects (or sixths as they 
are called at Rugby) in the house. Many 
masters remembered them for good, parti- 
cularly Jacky, the housemaster, who had 
loved them all, especially Hugh. 

217 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



In addition to this, one of the leading 
fellows in the house, who was afterwards 
to be captain of the school fifteen and 
cricket eleven, lieutenant in the corps, 
and one of the raquet pair, had been at 
my private school. I shared a study 
with another fellow who had been at my 
private school. Two boys accompanied 
me from there, one of whom was my next 
best friend to Ronnie. His parents were 
in India, and he had spent some of his 
holidays with Ronnie and me. 

But though I loved Rugby and was 
happy there, I can't say I was a success. 
I made few friends, who have since, with 
one exception, drifted out of my life. I 
was too timid to enjoy Rugger. I never 
achieved distinction at cricket. I got into 
the sixth my last term, but hadn't the 
force of character to enjoy the prefec- 
tural powers which that fact conferred 
upon me. The fact is that I left when I was 
i6, and it is between i6 and i8 that the 

218 



SCHOOL 

full enjoyment of school life comes and 
boys reap the harvest they have sown. Had 
I stayed another year I should have be- 
longed to the leading generation, strength- 
ened my friendships and developed what 
was latent in my character. As it was, I 
left at an unfortunate age. I was pushed 
Into the sixth a year before my contemi- 
poraries. My friendships were only half 
formed, and I had only just begun to feel 
strength of body and mind developing In me. 

As a junior I was too conscientious, 
and not light-hearted enough. I hardly 
had any adventures at Rugby, because 
I had an incurable instinct for keeping 
rules. I worked hard at mathematics 
and French, and my report generally read, 
" Good ability. Might exert himself more. " 
At classics and chemistry I did as little work 
as possible, and any report generally read, 
"Hard-working but not bright. " 

On the whole I think I was pretty happy 
at Rugby; but I never look back to my 

219 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



school days as the happiest part of my life. 
I have had many happier times since. But 
still, my house was a good one. Jacky, the 
housemaster, was wonderfully kind and wise. 
He hardly ever interfered with the affairs 
of the house, but left it all — in appearance — 
to the " Sixths. " Actually, nothing escaped 
him. The tone of the house was on the 
whole extraordinarily clean and whole- 
some, and the fellows who had dirty minds 
were a small minority, and easily avoided. 
At all events, very little of that sort of thing 
reached me. 

At sixteen and a half I went to the Royal 
Military Academy at Woolwich, commonly 
known as "the Shop.'' There I spent the 
two most miserable years of my life, and 
made the second of my great friendships. 
In these days the Shop was still a pretty 
rough place, and at the moment it was 
unusually full. I think there were over 
300 fellows there altogether, and there 

were about 70 in my term. My first 

220 



SCHOOL 

experience was unfortunate. I was inter- 
viewing the Adjutant, a keen sportsman 
and a bit of a tartar. He eyed me un- 
favourably, asked what games I could 
play, and when I replied that I had no 
great proficiency in any he commented, 
"Humph, a good-for-nothing!" and dis- 
missed me. 

I am by nature slow, stolid and clumsy. 
1 was bad at being "smart"; I was slow 
and clumsy at drill; map making and 
geometrical drawing were physical impos- 
sibilities to me; I was incredibly slow 
and stupid at machinery, mechanism and 
electricity. The only subject which inter- 
ested me was military history. In my first 
term I dropped from about forty-fourth 
to about seventieth in my class, and I kept 
near the bottom until my fourth term, when 
I failed in my electricity exam., and had to 
stay one term more. In the same term 
I received a prize for the best essay on the 
lessons of the South African War. 

221 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



Oh, the misery of those terms at Wool- 
wich! I hated the work, the drill, the 
gym and even the riding school. I hated 
the officers, and above all I hated the spirit 
of the place. As far as I remember, the 
one eternal topic of conversation and sub- 
ject of "wit" was the sexual relation. 
Of course the boys had never been taught 
sensibly anything about it. Consequently 
the place was continually circulated with 
filthy books, pictures, stories, etc. When 
I went there I was extraordinarily inno- 
cent, and devoid of furiosity, I had been 
recently the more disposed to purity through 
the death of my mother. At Woolwich I 
remained extraordinarily innocent and un- 
curious, letting the poisonous stream flow 
continually by me, shrinking from its 
stench, and finding more and more relief 
in my own company. I must have been a 
very unpleasant person at that time. 

One friend I had. He was a small, 
compact, keen, and capable little Rug- 



SCHOOL 

blan named F . He was like me In 

that he had recently lost his parents, 
and was interested In religion and philo- 
sophy in a boyish way. Unlike me he 
rather enjoyed Woolwich. He had a lot 
of friends, was keen on riding and on a 
good deal of the work, and generally speak- 
ing plunged into life, taking the rough with 
the smooth, and both in good part. Al- 
though we have drifted far apart in ideals 
and sympathies, and though misunderstand- 
ing has come in and destroyed our friend- 
ship, I shall never cease to be grateful for all 

that F did for me in those days. He 

routed mxe out when I was in the blues, 
laughed at me, cheered me up and made 
me look at life with new eyes. Moreover he 
did this, as I know, in defiance of the set 
with whom he was friendly, who despised 
me for a milksop, and were at no pains to 

conceal the fact. But for F , my life at 

the Shop would have been intolerable. 
Besides him, I had a few associates, 

223 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



boys with whom I naturally associated 
for the simple reason that they, too, were 
left out of the main current of the life of 
the place. But they were not particularly 
congenial. One or two were hard workers. 
One was a great slacker, and more timid, 
physically and morally, than even I. He 
was a boy with a fatal facility for doing 
useless things moderately well, especially 
in the musical line. He was even more 
frightened of gym and horses than I was, 
and unlike me was not ashamed to show 
it. If the Shop was purgatory to me, 
it must have been hell to him. 

My happiest times were week-ends spent 
at home. I used to arrive on Saturday 
evening and leave on Sunday evening. 
About now I began to get to know my 
father much better, and to develop my 
theological bent under his advice. In 
my disillusionment as to my capacity 
for military life I began to wish I had 
chosen the clerical profession. I think 

224 



SCHOOL 

my father had the shrewdness to see that 
failure in one profession was not neces- 
sarily the sign of a '' call " in another 
direction. Anyway, he did not discourage 
me; but spoke of five years in the Army 
as the best training for a parson. 

I remember avowing my intention of 
becoming a parson to one of my more 
friendly acquaintances at the Shop, and 
he replied that I wouldn't set the Thames 
on fire, because I had such a monotonous 
voice. 

In spite of seeking relief from my uncon- 
genial surroundings in religion and theology, 
I did not join myself to any one else. There 
was a so-called "Pi Squad," or Bible class, 
held weekly, but I only went once, and didn't 
like It. I was always peculiarly sensitive 
about prigglshness in those who professed 
themselves to be religious openly, and 
generally thought I detected prigglshness 
In any "Bible circle" or similar institution 
that I came across. I think my theology 

IS 225 



A STUDENT IN AEMS 



mainly consisted in speculations about the 
future state — I remember I emphatically de- 
clined to believe in hell — and my religion 
consisted mainly in fairly regular attend- 
ance at Matins and Communion. 

Another effect of the intensity with 
which I hated my surroundings was that 
I read a lot of good novels — George Eliot, 
the Brontes, Scott, Dickens, Jane Austen, 
Thackeray, Besant, etc. A book which 
I read over and over again was Arthur 
Benson's Hill of Trouble ^ and other Stories, 
Those legends, with their imaginative set- 
ting, charm of language and beautiful 
religious ideas were more restful to my 
unquiet spirit than anything else I read. 

The actual conditions of life at the 
Shop were pretty barbaric. The aim was 
to make it as much like barracks as possible. 
Each term was housed in a different side of 
the square of buildings which form the 
Academy, and the fourth term were spread 
among the houses of the other terms as 

226 



SCHOOL 

corporals. My first term I shared a room 
with three other fellows. I think it was the 
ugliest room I have ever lived in, without 
exception. It had high whitewashed brick 
walls. In each corner was a bed which 
folded up against the wall in the day time, 
and was concealed by a square of print cur- 
tains. There were a deal table, four Wind- 
sor chairs, a shelf with four basins, and a 
cupboard with four lockers. All the wood- 
work was painted khaki. The contrast 
with the little study at Rugby, with its 
diamond-paned window, its matchboard 
panelling surmounted by a paper of one's 
own choosing, its ledge for photos and orna- 
ments ("bim ledge" so called), its eggshell 
blue cupboards, baize curtains and window 
box, was striking. 

It used to be the custom to go to and 
from the bathroom attired in a sponge, in 
connexion with which an amusing incident 
once happened. 

A cadet in his second year was on'^the 

227 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



bathroom landing, when he perceived that 
the mother and sisters of another cadet were 
coming upstairs. From sounds in the bath- 
room he realized that they would meet a 
naked corporal just as they reached the 
landing. The door of the bathroom opened 
outwards, and with admirable presence of 
mind he rushed back, and putting his back 
against the door and his feet against the wall, 
imprisoned the corporal. The corporal, in 
the approved Shop version of Billings- 
gate, began to blaspheme at the top of his 
voice, so when the ladies reached the top of 
the stairs they saw a vision of a cadet with 
his feet to the wall and his back to a door 
singing at the top of his voice to drown a 
commotion within ! 

On another occasion in my second year, 
when I was sharing a room with one other 
fellow, I had a sister to tea. On arriving 
in my room I found that my stablemate 
had been playing hockey, and was at the 
moment in the bathroom, having thought- 

228 



SCHOOL 

lessly left all his clothes in the room — 
mostly on the floor. 

On the last day of my first term the 
corporals and officers were all absent at a 
farewell dinner to the former, and we 
received information that the third term 
were going to raid our house, with a view 
to "toshing" us in a cold bath. We 
therefore prepared for action. Every re- 
ceptacle which would hold water was 
taken to the upper landing, full. Then 
all the chairs in the house were roped to- 
gether, and placed on the stairs as an 
obstacle. The defenders then took up 
their position at the windows and at 
the top of the stairs. In due course the 
enemy's forces arrived, and stormed the 
stairs, under a heavy fire of water. The 
obstacle was at length destroyed, and a 
solid phalanx of wet bodies swarmed up 
the stairs. We formed a similar phalanx 
and charged to meet them. I happened 
to be first, and much to my discomfiture 

229 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



the enemy's phalanx parted in the middle, 
and I was rapidly passed down the stairs 
— a prisoner! Fortunately at the bottom I 
found a relieving party from the next house, 
making a diversion on the enemy's rear. 
With great valour we dragged down a foe, 
and toshed him in the bath that had been 
made ready for us. "The tosher toshed!" 

The next day we surveyed the damage. 
All the chairs and banisters were broken, 
the whitewash was rubbed off the bricks 
by wet shoulders and nearly all the basins 
were broken. That day was the day of 
Lord Roberts's half-yearly inspection ! 

There was not such another battle until 
my third term, when we were the aggres- 
sors. This time the damage was even 
greater, for the defenders let down tables 
across the stairs as an obstacle, and we 
battered our way through with scaffolding 
poles. There were some casualties that 
day, owing to an indiscriminate use of 
mop handles. 

230 



SCHOOL 

On the day of Lord Roberts's inspection 
we had to change from parade dress to 
gym dress, and it was during the change 
that Lord Roberts inspected our quarters. 
He went into one room and found a fellow 
just half-way through his change — ^with 
nothing at all on! The room was called 
to attention, and with great presence of 
mind the boy dashed into the bed curtains 
and stood to attention there, while Lord 
Roberts had an animated conversation 
with him! 

There were jolly moments in the life at 
the Shop. On Saturdays, after dinner, the 
unfortunates who had not got away for 
the week-end used to have *' stodges'' 
after dinner. Having put away a sub- 
stantial dinner, we changed into flannels, 
and used to crowd into some one's room, 
and eat muffins and smoke cigars. I re- 
member one night there were eighteen of 
us in one small room. 

In order to go away for a week-end one 

231 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



had to obtain (i) an invitation, (2) per- 
mission from parent or guardian to accept 
the invitation. One week my brother, 
who was working at the Admiralty, oflfered 

his flat to myself and F , as he was 

going to Brighton himself. Fleming wrote 
to his guardian — a Scotsman — for per- 
mission to stay with Captain Hankey. 
The guardian wrote back for more informa- 
tion. He saw by the Army List that Cap- 
tain Hankey existed, but who were the 

Hankeys? etc., etc. F wrote back a 

furious letter, saying that he expected to 
have his friends accepted without ques- 
tion, and received the permission. We 
went. The awkward thing was that Cap- 
tain Hankey was not there, and we shud- 
dered to think of the rage of F 's 

guardian if he should find out. Worse 
still, the guardian was supposed to be 
staying at the Oriental Club in Hanover 
Square, and my brother's flat was in Oxford 
Street ! However, we didn't meet. 

232 



SCHOOL 

F and I neither of us knew Lon- 
don, and had the time of our Hves. We 
dined at Frascati's — a palace of splendour 
in our eyes — and went to His Majesty's to 
see Beerbohm Tree in Ulysses. When it 
came to Hades, we held each other's hands ! 
On Sunday we went to St. Peter's, Vere 
Street, but were so furious at being kept 
waiting for pew holders long after service 
had commenced, that we went on to the 
Audley Street Chapel, a most queer little 
place. It was full of monuments to the 
dependents of peers, in which the peers 
figured very largely and the dependents 
fared humbly — the epitome of flunkey dom. 
Among these tablets was one inscribed — 

" To Jolm Wilkes, 
Friend of Liberty.** 

Truly refreshing! 

We finished the day at some old friends 
of mine, and voted the week-end a huge 
success. 

233 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



When I went to Woolwich I was just 
on the verge of getting keen on games 
and beginning to feel self-confident, and 
to enjoy the fellowship of my comrades. 
Woolwich nipped this in the bud. I left 
with no self-confidence, having renounced 
games, and with a sense of solitariness 
among my comrades. I was a misan- 
thrope, and the unhappiest sort of egotist 
— the kind that dislikes himself. To say 
the truth, too, I was then, and always 
have been, a bit of a funk, physically, 
which didn't make me happier. On the 
other hand, I was an omnivorous reader of 
everything which did not concern my pro- 
fession, and a dabbler in military history. 

I have sometimes thought that I was 
unconsciously a bit of a hero at Woolwich, 
standing out for purity and religion in an 
atmosphere of filth and blasphemy. I have 
come to the conclusion, however, that 
there was nothing in this. As to the general 
atmosphere, there is no doubt that it was 

234 



SCHOOL 

singularly pernicious; even the officers and 
instructors contributed their quota of filthy 
jokes, and there was no religious instruction 
or influence at all except the parade service 
at the garrison church on Sunday, if one 
happened not to be on leave. But as to my 
heroism I am reluctantly compelled to be 
sceptical. I went as far as I felt my inclina- 
tion, and stopped after a time because 
instinct was too strong the other way. 

As I have said before, I have always 
had an insurmountable instinct for keeping 
rules. At school I could never bring myself 
to transgress, although I knew that trans- 
gression was the road to adventure. So 
at the Shop, however much I may have 
wished to be in the swim, my instinct for the 
moral and religious code of home was too 
strong for me. It required no self-control 
to prevent myself from slipping into blas- 
phemy and filth. On the contrary, in 
order to do so I should have had to violate 
my strongest instincts, and exercised a 

235 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



will to evil much stronger than any will 
power that I possessed at that time. If, 
when I left Woolwich, I was compara- 
tively pure, it was because nature did not 
allow me to be anything else. 

To say the truth, I have never felt the 
sway of passions to anything like the same 
extent as most men seem to. I have never 
cared for the society of women for its 
sexual attraction. Consequently all my 
women friends have been just the same 
to me as my men friends — friends whom 
I could talk to about the things that inter- 
ested me. 

I don't boast of this, I only state the 
fact. I am not proud of it because I know 
that some passion is necessary to make 
heroes and even saints. 



236 



SOME NOTES ON THE FRAGMENT 
OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY "HILDA" 

I HAVE before me as I write a pencil sketch, 
limned with considerable care, of a rather 
disagreeable looking young man, and be- 
neath it is written — 

"D. W. A. H., by Himself." 

It is a profile. The eye has almost dis- 
appeared under the brow, the mouth is 
tightly closed to a degree that is quite un- 
pleasant and there is a deliberate exag- 
geration .of a slight defect he actually had 
— a tendency for the lower jaw to protrude 
a little. This little defect hardly any of 
his friends seem to have noticed, for most 
of them execrate it as a libel in the other- 
wise admittedly beautiful photograph at 
the beginning of this volume. The ex- 
pression in the sketch is above all — dubious. 
So did Donald see himself. 

237 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



For the rest of us no doubt the lessons 
Mr. Haselden has for us in his caricatures, 
*' ourselves as we see ourselves'' and "as 
others see us," are necessary. But not 
for Donald. The drawing is pasted into 
an album which contains mainly Oxford 
College groups, and there is a certain un- 
pleasant resemblance between it and his 
full face presentment in one of the groups 
— in which he has *'the group expression'* 
rather badly. Assuming it to have been 
drawn at Oxford, or not very long after 
he left, I think it must belong very nearly to 
a time when he was going off abroad on one 
of his long trips, and I had the sympathy 
of a dear old lady friend of ours on having 
to part with him. I remember replying, 
"Yes, it always seem.s as if peace and 
happiness, truth and justice, religion and 
piety went with him when he goes!" She 
laughed a good deal, and then said, seri- 
ously, repeating over to herself the stately 
mounting sixteenth century phrases, " But 
it's quite true, you know!" I hardly 
think, though, that I should have said it of 
the young man in the sketch! 

I am now going to make a comment or 

238 



NOTES 

two on my brother's word-pictures as 
I should if he were by my side. But 
first I should like his readers to know 
and realize that both were written before 
the period of what I may call Donald's 
"Renaissance," a period that can be 
roughly marked by the publication of his 
first book, The Lord of all Good Life, 

Up to then he had been struggling in vain 
for self-expression. How he had worked the 
amount of MSS. he has left alone proves — 
for we have it on a friend's testimony that 
"he tore up much of what he wrote"; 
and he also had experienced and suffered, 
violating his natural "timidity" and his 
in some ways, precarious health, for he had 
never got over certain weaknesses en- 
gendered by his illness in Mauritius — in his 
struggle to get a true basis for a solution of 
the meaning of life and of religion. What 
cost him most was the knowledge that he 
was frequently doubted and misunder- 
stood by many of those whose approbation 
would have been very dear to him. This 
is proved by his constantly expressed 
gratitude to the one or two who never 
doubted him for one moment. 

239 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



With the writing of this book, as we 
know, all his difficulties began to clear 
away, and at the same time he began to 
reap the harvest of love and admiration 
that he had sown in his toils to produce it. 
And the result was he opened out like a 
flower to the sun! No one can doubt this 
for a moment who has read his book of 
a year later. The Student in ArmSy and 
rejoiced in the radiant happiness of its 
inspiration. 

He had more than once said to me dur- 
ing the past two years, "You know it 
makes a tremendous difference to me when 
people really like me.^' No longer was it 
a case of "one friend at a time.'* The 
period for that was over and done with. 
He had come into his own. He was ready 
for a universal brotherhood, and no hand 
would ever be held out to him in vain. 

It is impossible to believe that he does 
not now know of and appreciate all the 
beautiful tributes that have come to him 
since his "passing" — from the perfect 
wreath of immortelles weaved by Mr. 
Strachey to the sweet pansy of thought 
dropped by a little fellow V. A. D. of mine 

240 



NOTES 

who said beautifully and courageously — 
though knowing him solely through his 
book — "We feel since he gave us his thought 
that he belongs a tiny bit to us, too, '* thus 
voicing the feeling of many. 

I believe the paper entitled "'My Home" to 
have been written at Oxford, and "School" 
not so very long after. In any case, I have 
definite proof of their both belonging to 
Donald's pre-" Renaissance" period, for the 

friendship with F , that began at "the 

Shop" and went under a cloud for a time, 
was renewed with fresh vigour in 19 14, and 
has burned brightly ever since. Only last 

July was I sent by him a letter of F 's 

from the trenches, with the injunction, 
"Please put this among my treasures," 
and there is an allusion to a story told 
in this letter in the article entitled "Ro- 
mance" of the present volume. 

To return to "My Home," I question 
whether the love and devotion of "Hilda" 
and " Ma" for Hugh was so entirely unselfish. 
For my mother I fully believe, as for 
"Hilda," Hugh was the epitome of all 
that was fine, splendid and joyous in life. 
He was the glorious knight, the "preux 

x6 241 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



chevalier" "sans peur et sans reproche," 
who rode forth at dawn with clean sword and 
shining armour, and all the world before 
him, yet keeping his heart for ever in his 
home. He was the child of her youth as 
Donald was the child of her maturity. 
Deep down in her wonderfully varied nature 
there were certain bottomless springs of cour- 
age, daring and enterprise which she herself 
had little chance of expressing and of which 
Hugh alone was the personification. 

As long as I can remember Hugh had 
been my ideal and made all the interest and 
joy of life for me. Whether he were at home 
or abroad I never had a thought I did not 
share with him. When he died, the best 
part of me died too, or was paralysed 
rather, and Heaven knows what sort of a 
''substitute'' I should have been for "Ma'' 
to Donald, had not the baby Hugh come, 
just in time, with healing in his wings to 
restore life to the best part of me ! 

I am glad to think that Donald's "Auto- 
biography" was written before 19 14, for I 
know that even before that I was becom- 
ing more to him than a "substitute." I too 
have my memories and pictures ! 

242 



NOTES 

It Is May, 1915. I am in the country- 
house — cleaning is going on at home. 

I get a letter to say that the Rifle Brigade 
may leave for France at any time, and that 
Donald may get some ** leave'' on Saturday 
or Sunday. 

I make a dash for town. 

There I find a telegram of reckless and 
unconscionable length, running into two 
pages. He cannot come up — they may 
leave at any moment. It seems hardly 
worth while my bothering to come to 
Aldershot on the chance — he may be unable 
to leave barracks. 

I write a return telegram — also of reck- 
less and unconscionable length, and reply 
paid — it is a relief to do so — asking for a 
place of meeting at Aldershot to be sug- 
gested. 

I get no answer at all, and on Sunday 
morning, in despair, I go over to see my 
aunt and cousin. My aunt is my mother's 
sister and a sportswoman. She counsels, 
" Go at all costs. " Dorothy will come with 
me: Dorothy is Donald's best woman 
pal — ^she reminds him of his mother. She 
is all that is wholesome and comportable. 

243 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



The element of enjoyment comes in, and 
I go home and pack a nice lunch. 

We arrive at Aldershot. 

There is no one on the platform to meet 
us, and we push our way through the turn- 
stile. 

There is Donald, on the outskirts of the 
waiting crowd — a tall, soldierly figure in 
the uniform of a private — for he has resigned 
his sergeant's stripes by now. 

His face is very boyish — not the face of 
the photograph at the beginning of this 
book: that was taken after he had been 
to France, and had been wounded, and had 
written "A Passing in June,'* and "The 
Honour of the Brigade" — but a much 
younger face, really boyish. 

He glances quickly and anxiously at 
every face that passes, and each time he 
is a little more disappointed — but he tries 
not to show it. 

I am not tall and cannot catch his eye. 
It is like being at a play, watching him! 
All at once he sees me! Involuntarily a 
sudden quick spasm of joy passes across 
his face, absolutely transfiguring it. 

He smooths it away quickly, for he is a 

244 



NOTES 

Briton and does not like to show his feel- 
ings — but he has given himself away! 

Dorothy and I shall never forget that 
look. And it was for me — at first he does 
not see Dorothy. When he does it is an 
added pleasure. 

With two ladies to escort he assumes 
a lordly air. 

He had thought of everything. We 
would like some tea? Yes, all the big 
places are shut as it is Sunday, but he 
has marked down a little place on his way 
to the station. 

It is a lovely day, and we are very 
happy! 

The girl who waits upon us at the little 
tea place likes us, and so do the other 
Tommies and their friends who are having 
tea there. 

We sit at little tables, but at very close 
quarters with each other, and we smile at 
them and they at us. 

I have brought Donald some letters, 
which pleases him, and Dorothy has brought 
him some splendid socks, knitted by herself. 

After tea we walk across an arid plain 
to a little wood, and sit down under the trees. 

245 



A STUDENT IN ARMS 



Donald changes to the new socks — those he 
had on were wringing wet ! 

He picks us little bunches of violets, 
hyacinths and wild strawberry flowers — 
we have them still. 

We are very happy the whole of the day, 
and have my sandwiches and cake and 
fruit for supper, there under the trees. 
And here in thought let me leave "The 
Student in Arms,"' who was to me part 
son, best pal, brother, comrade, and coun- 
sellor on all subjects — and more than a 
little bit of grandpapa ! 

He could be so many different things 
because, as another friend and cousin 
said, " he seemed to know everything about 
everybody. ^' 

I like to think of those two fine spirits 
— Hugh and Donald — each with a hand 
to the tiny baby nephew, and a word of 
greeting for me when I go over the top. 



THE END 



246 



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